RACING MINDS DISCUSSION GROUP

MARCH 1, 2023: An interdisciplinary discussion of Josie Gill's Biofictions: Race, Genetics and the Contemporary Novel with geneticist and author Dr. Jason Morris

Literature and Mind will hosted a discussion of Josie Gill's Biofictions with Dr. Jason Morris. Dr. Morris is a writer of literary fiction and professor of genetics at Fordham University in New York, whose teaching and research interests span the natural sciences and bioethics. His recent course, Diverse Biology/Shared Humanity, incorporates readings and approaches from biology and literary studies to provide students with an understanding of the diversity of human experience. Our discussion focused on the introduction and conclusion to Gill's Biofictions. We will drew upon Dr. Morris' expertise as a geneticist and novelist throughout the discussion, exploring how the book raises questions and forms connections across multiple academic fields.

JANUARY 25, 2022: An interdisciplinary discussion with Professor Sowon Park, of the English Department, and Professor Kyle Ratner, of Psychological and Brain Sciences on Park’s: "Minoritization: Why This Is an Issue"

We read Sowon's "Minoritization: Why This Is an Issue" and explored how her paper raises questions and draws connections across multiple academic fields. Points of discussion included: What gets to exist in the world and why? How/why do things get erased in certain circles and not in other circles? How does what gets filtered out and knocked down in society emerge within literary texts? The human psychological urge to categorize and how this affects discussions of minoritization. Born-translated authors/works and the question of diversity within global literature. The Psychological Science Accelerator. Moving away from “construct validity” in favor of “ecological validity” within psychological studies.

NOVEMBER 8, 2021: A discussion of Stephanie Batiste's Spaces Between: Black Performances Of Death and Violence in Millennial Los Angeles

We read Batiste’s "Krump time: Kinetic Affect, Resurrections, and Black Reorientations of Time" and "My’s Silent Scream: Memory, Traumatic Time, and the Embodiment of the Black Surreal in Rickerby Hinds’s Dreamscape" and discussed how her upcoming work, Spaces Between, explores questions of race and cultural performance.

OCTOBER 18, 2021: A discussion of Sylvia Wynter's essay, "Towards the Sociogenic Principle: Fanon, Identity, the Puzzle of Conscious Experience, and What it is like to be Black."

We read Sylvia Wynter’s “Towards the Sociogenic Principle.” Points of discussion included: Double consciousness––how does this idea help us move forward? Pursuing cognitive mind studies from beyond an exclusively white position. How Wynter takes Fanon’s concept of sociogeny and reframes it as the “sociogenic principle,” thereby relating it to the genomic principle of organic life (the culture-specific coding of the species-specific category of the human) How to bridge the interdisciplinary gap between the humanities and sciences?––How do we get Dehaene to read Wynter? 

LITERATURE AND MIND FOUNDATIONS

Literature and Mind Foundations was a graduate and undergraduate reading and discussion group, initiated in the 2021-2022 academic year, intended as a space to read and discuss texts relevant to the study of Literature and Mind on an introductory level. As a group, we selected reading material from the English Department's Literature and the Mind Reading List that was of interest to us either personally or academically and worked through this material in a casual, discussion-based format. Our aim was to make this reading group an opportunity for low-stakes (but not low-enjoyment) engagement with the thinkers, concepts, and texts that make up the foundational study of Literature and Mind. We hope that these meetings provided a space for grads and undergrads to gain a general sense of the field, become familiar with its major works as highlighted by UCSB's English Department, and determine which ideas contained within these texts might serve their own interests as students and lovers of literature. Though all were welcome, we particularly encouraged upper-division undergraduates, enthusiastic English majors, and first and second-year graduate students (especially those considering Lit & Mind as an area of study/teaching) to attend.

FEBRUARY 22, 2022: D.W. Winnicott’s “Transitional Objects and Transitional Phenomena—A Study of the First Not-Me Possession”

NOVEMBER 30, 2021: Bracha Ettinger’s “Wit(h)nessing Trauma and the Matrixial Gaze”

NOVEMBER 9, 2021: Jacques Lacan’s “The Mirror Stage”

OCTOBER 26, 2021: Sigmund Freud’s “Revision of the Theory of Dreams”