Dawn Herrera’s bio:
Dawn Herrera is a theorist whose teaching and writing are dedicated to the invigoration of the political imaginary. She holds a Ph.D. from the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago, where she completed a dissertation on non-sovereign conceptions of freedom in the work of Hannah Arendt and Michel Foucault. Related research interests include the spatiality and temporality of politics, play, metaphor, violence, and the critique of political economy. Her current book project traces the genealogy of the nation-state in Foucault’s Collège de France lectures.

Ben Helphand’s bio:
For more than twenty years, Ben Helphand has focused on ways to help communities have a direct hand in the creation and stewardship of the built environment.  He is the Executive Director of NeighborSpace, a nonprofit urban land trust dedicated to preserving and sustaining community-managed open spaces in Chicago.  NeighborSpace shoulders the responsibility of property ownership for a network of flower, vegetable, and prairie gardens across the City so that community groups can focus on gardening and community building.  In addition to his work at NeighborSpace, Helphand is Co-founder and President of the Friends of the Bloomingdale Trail (FBT), an all-volunteer, community-based organization that advocated for the conversion of the under-used Bloomingdale rail embankment into a public greenway from 2002 until the project's completion in 2015.  As the official Park Advisory Council for the Bloomingdale Trail, FBT now serves as its long-term community steward.  Helphand has also served as a board member of the Active Transportation Alliance, the Mayor's Pedestrian Advisory Committee, Grow Greater Englewood, and the Chicago Housing Trust.  In 2012, he was awarded a Chicago Community Trust Emerging Leader Fellowship, and was part of Next City's 2018 Vanguard class.  Originally from Oregon, he holds a degree in the history of religion from the University of Chicago and studied at Northwestern University's Medill School of Journalism.

Readings

Hannah Arendt, selections from The Human Condition (1998, 1958):  Prologue, 1-6; Chapter IV, 139-174
Hannah Arendt, “The Crisis in Culture” Between Past and Future (1977), 194-222

Join us via Zoom

Topic: "Ecological Violence and the Remedy of Culture" at OICR
Time: Dec 15, 2022 05:00 PM Pacific Time (US and Canada)

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Readings

Jacques Ellul, “The Conditions for the Existence of Propaganda,” Propaganda: The Formation of Men’s Attitudes, 88-117

 Please read the entire book prior to the seminar

ZOOM INFORMATION
Topic: Jacques Ellul's Propaganda: The Revisitation of a Classic Study
Time: Apr 11, 2022 06:30 PM Pacific Time (US and Canada)

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An OICR Roundtable Discussion led by Vivina Rie-Boster, Art Historian; Governor, Oregon Institute

Discussants:

Michael Hurt, Cultural Theory and Art History, Korea National University of Arts
Kyu Hyun Kim, Japanese and Korean History, University of California, Davis
Chris Witherspoon, theGrio.com, NBC; Founder and CEO, PopViewers

Four experts on Korean history, culture, and popular culture discuss Hwang Dong-hyuk’s Netflix survivalist drama, situating it within a larger context of concerns, interests, and preoccupations

BIOS

Vivina Rie-Boster, born in Seoul, Korea, received a B.A. in Fine Arts and East Asian Studies from Harvard-Radcliffe College; an M.A. in East Asian Regional Studies at Harvard University, with a research thesis devoted to Sen no Rikkyu and Yanagi Soetsu; and an M.T.S. from Harvard Divinity School, where she focused on East Asian and Himalayan religions as well as the study of classical Mongolian.  She has served as a Teaching Fellow in Inner Asian Civilizations at Harvard, lectured on the history of Indian art at Portland State University, and sat on the boards of the Portland Art Museum’s Asian Art Council and the Oregon Korea Foundation.  Her current research interests include Korean ceramics, specifically, buncheong ware

Michael W. Hurt lives in Seoul, where he researches youth, street fashion, and digital subcultures, and lectures on Cultural Theory and Art History at the Korea National University of Arts.  His work can be described as Visual Sociology, and often involves using the camera to access and document emergent digital subcultures.  In 2006, he started Korea's first street-fashion blog, and three years later, published the first English-language book on Korean fashion.  His current research focuses on the political economy of the pay model on Korean Instagram and the analysis of the Korean Wave (Hallyu).  He holds a B.A. in History and American Civilization from Brown University and a doctorate in Comparative Ethnic Studies, UC Berkeley, and has served as a consulting editor for the Korea Journal at the Korean Commission for UNESCO

Kyu Hyun Kim is Associate Professor of Japanese and Korean History at the University of California, Davis.  He holds a BA degree from Harvard-Radcliffe College and a Ph.D. in History and East Asian Languages from Harvard University.  He is the author of The Age of Visions and Arguments: Parliamentarianism and the National Public Sphere in Early Meiji Japan (Harvard Asia Center Publications, 2008), and is currently working on a book on the wartime mobilization of colonized Koreans in the 1930s and 1940s.  He has written numerous articles, book chapters, and review essays on modern Japanese and Korean history, Korean cinema and comics, and Japanese popular culture.  He is a Contributing Editor and Academic Adviser to www.koreanfilm.org, the first English-language website devoted to the subject of New Korean Cinema

Chris Witherspoon has served as an entertainment correspondent for Fandango and CNN, and was the founding Entertainment Editor for NBC’s theGrio.com.  He regularly appears on MSNBC, TODAY, The Wendy Williams Show, and NBC’s Nightly News.  Over the years, he has conducted numerous interviews with a range of personalities, including Meryl Streep, Tom Hanks, Oprah Winfrey, Will Smith, Viola Davis, Hugh Jackman, Denzel Washington, Harrison Ford, and Kerry Washington.  An alumnus of Ohio University and the NBC Page Program, he got his start as an intern at ABC’s Good Morning America

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ZOOM INFORMATION

Topic: OICR Roundtable Discussion [#2]: "As for Squid Game, We'd Really Rather Not Talk about It"
Time: Dec 20, 2021 06:30 PM Pacific Time (US and Canada)

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Selections

Click to view + download PDF of readings.

• Childish Gambino, This Is America. Released May 5, 2018

• Abena Koomson performs "Let America Be America Again," by Langston Hughes. Poets in unexpected places. Published December 4, 2014

• Emma Lazarus, “The New Colossus.” Written 1883

• Richard Wright, Chapter V, Black Boy, 107-126. Originally published 1945

• Alexis de Tocqueville, Selections from Democracy in America, trans. Henry Reeve:  Chapter II:  “Origin of the Anglo-Americas,” Pt. II, 53-64; Chapter III: “Social Condition of the Anglo-Americas,” 64-72; Chapter IV:  “The Principle of the Sovereignty of the People in America,” 73-75; 90-101; Chapter V:  “Necessity of Examining the Condition of the States Before that of the Union at Large,” Pt. II, 101-16; Chapter VI: “Judicial Power in the United States,” 116-24; Chapter VII:  “Political Jurisdiction in the United States,” 124-129. First published in English 1838

• G.K. Chesterton, Selections from What I Saw in America:  “Some American Cities,” 63-79. First published 1922

• Jean Baudrillard, “Utopia Achieved,” America, 75-105. First published 1989  

• Hannah Arendt, “On Humanity in Dark Times: Thoughts about Lessing,” Men in Dark Times, 3-31. Originally published 1968

• Hannah Arendt, Selection from “The Revolutionary Tradition and Its Lost Treasure,” On Revolution, 217-251. Originally published 1963

• Hannah Arendt, “Truth and Politics,” Between Past and Future, 227-264. Originally published 1961

• Hannah Arendt, “The Alliance between Mob and Capital,” The Origins of Totalitarianism, 147-157. Originally published 1951

• Susan Sontag, “What’s Happening in America?” Partisan Review, Winter 1967

• Theodor Adorno, Selections from Minima Moralia: Reflections on Damaged Life:  “Paysage,” 48; “Dwarf fruit,” 49-50; “The Health unto Death,” 58-60; “Diagnosis,” 123-124; “All the world’s not a stage,” 143-145; “Don’t exaggerate,” 233-235. First published in English 1951

• Peter Sloterdijk, “The Exception: Anatomy of a Temptation, Americanology 2,” In the World Interior of Capital, 233-248. First published in English 2013

• Giorgio Agamben, “A Brief History of the State of Exception,” State of Exception, 11-22. Originally published in English 2005

• Jacques Derrida on American Attitude, e-flux conversations. Published 2016

• Joyce Carol Oates, “‘Good News!’” It Occurs to Me That I Am America: New Stories and Art, ed., Jonathan Santlofer, 247-262. Published 2018

• Marion Mainwaring, John Quincy Adams and Russia: A Sketch of Early Russian-American Relations as Recorded in the Papers of the Adams Family and Some of Their Contemporaries.  Published 1965*

  *Announcing the OICR Prize for the Redemption of the Most Illustrious Lost, Discarded, or Forgotten Work for Making Sense of Present-Day American Crises & Dilemmas

  We recently happened to find mention of an intriguingly-titled monograph on the sixth President of the United States by the late writer, critic, and translator Marion Mainwaring.  (The reference appears on the back flap of a discarded copy of The Portrait Game, a little-known book based on a little-known collection in the Bibliothèque nationale de France consisting of drawings of imaginary persons by the Russian writer Ivan Sergeyevich Turgenev and subsequent character sketches composed by Turgenev and his friends—sketches translated and edited by Mainwaring, and published in English in 1973, a full 117 years after the group played their first round of “the portrait game” in Paris in 1856.)  Mainwaring’s study John Quincy Adams and Russia: A Sketch of Early Russian-American Relations as Recorded in the Papers of the Adams Family and Some of Their Contemporaries (1965) is now virtually impossible to find.  The Institute is offering a $250 cash prize to the first person who can locate and deliver a copy of the book to the Institute by the last day of October 2018, in time for OICR’s “Readings for Now” Seminar #4, which will be devoted to a variety of works on “Russian-American Relations,” early and late.  We will continue sponsoring this prize into the foreseeable future, with the second iteration completely open to any subject or theme of critical relevance.

Are there writings and records that might help us understand what is happening now? Join us for a roundtable discussion on Thursday, September 21, 2017, 7:00 p.m., at Mother Foucault's Bookshop. Our readings include Hannah Arendt, “Lying in Politics"; Vilém Flusser, “Criteria—Crisis—Criticism”; Georg Simmel “Knowledge, Truth, and Falsehood in Human Relations"; Henri Lefebvre, “The Idea of Reality"; and Theodor W. Adorno, “Opinion Delusion Society"--and can be found on this website.

Join us for a roundtable discussion on Thursday, September 21, 2017, 7:00 p.m., at Mother Foucault's Bookshop, 523 SE Morrison Street, Portland, Oregon 97214.

Selections:

Click to view + download PDF of readings.

• Hannah Arendt, “Lying in Politics,” Crises of the Republic, 3–13

• Vilém Flusser, “Criteria—Crisis—Criticism,” Vilém Flusser: Writings, 42–50

• Georg Simmel, “Knowledge, Truth, and Falsehood in Human Relations,” The Sociology of Georg Simmel, 307–316

• Henri Lefebvre, “The Idea of Reality,” Critique of Everyday Life: Foundations for a Sociology of the Everyday, vol. II, 487–500

• Theodor W. Adorno, “Opinion Delusion Society,” Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords, 105–122

Books can be purchased at Mother Foucault’s Bookshop.