Thirty-five graduate students gave presentations at the 2017 ASPECT Graduate Conference. Titled “Aesthetics, Politics, and Ethics in Fractured Times,” the conference took place March 31 to April 1.

Among those presenting from ASPECT (the Alliance for Social, Political, Ethical, and Cultural Thought) were: Judson Abraham, “Trump in World-Systemic Perspective”; Caroline Alphin, “Cyborg Neoliberalism: Problematizing the Body/Insecurity/City Nexus through Genre”; Amiel Bernal, “Truth in Epistemological and Philosophical Discourse”; Nada Berrada, “Agency under Hogra and Dispossession”; Claudio D’Amato, “A Non-Liberal Account of Global Development”; Taulby Edmondson, “Cultural Contestation on the ‘Field of Angels’”; Tim Filbert, “Cultural Governance, Energy Development, and Standing Rock: The Aesthetics of Resistance”; Rob Flahive, “Asymmetric Lines: World Heritage and the White City Imaginary”; Claire Gogan, “The Last Klezmer? Authenticity, Community, and Intergenerational Connections in the Life and Music of Peter Sokolow”; Johannes Grow, “Empire Redux: The EU and Violence at the Margins”; Hirbohd Hedayat, “The Birth of Transitional Regimes: An Analysis of Taxation, Transition, and Accession in Postcommunist States”; Darren Jackson, “Rancière’s Misreading of Deleuze’s Cinema 1and Cinema 2”; and Mario Khreiche, “The Hypernormalization of Anti-Semitism in American Mediascapes.”

Also presenting from ASPECT were Jordan Laney, “White Performances of a Diverse South: Unpacking the Cultural Politics of Early Bluegrass Festivals”; Leigh McKagen, “Space: The Final Sublime? Aesthetics of Space in Star Trek and Battlestar Galactica”; Galen Olmsted, “On How Consolidation States and Security States Relate”; Mary Ryan, “Social Imagination, Poverty, and the Role of American Theater”;  Melissa Schwartz, “Enacting Response to the ‘Other’: Jorie Graham’s Poetics of Sensing”; Ezgi Seref, “Assessing the Threshold of Life: The Limits of Emergency Decree Laws in Turkey”; Katy Shepard, “Why Can’t We Just Let Art Die? What It Is to Forget and to Be Forgotten in Terms of Art”; Faith Skiles, “A Look at Walter Benjamin’s ‘Critique of Violence’ through a Gendered Lens”; Emma Stamm, “Tactics for Cybernetic Sovereignty”; Alex Stubberfield, “On ‘Deplorables’: ‘The People’ in Donald Trump’s Populism”; Anthony Szczurek, “Timing the Politics of Climate Change: India and the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC)”; Dana Volk, “Passing: Intersections of Race, Gender, Sexuality, and Class”; and Shelby Ward, “The Hospitality of Street Food and Television: Re-Mapping the Liminal Table in the (Ethni)City.”

Graduate student presenters from the Department of Political Science included Julia Eggleston, “Theorizing Political Protests through Feminist Theory”; John Huennekens, “‘Only Unity Saves the Serb’: Normalizing Nationalism in Serbian Politics”; Patrick Salmons, with faculty member Scott Nelson, ”The Political Economy of a Trust Culture”; Elizabeth Schwartz, “The Necessary Procedures of Manhood: A Feminist Intervention in the Liberal-Communitarian Debate”; Ben Taylor, “(Re)Mapping the City: A Foucauldian Analysis of Inner-City Practices of Gang Territorialization”; and Madison Tepper, “(Un)Orthodox Religion: The Role of the Russian Orthodox Tradition in Modern Russian Nationalism.”

Pratama Pradheksa, a graduate student in Department of Science and Technology in Society, presented “The Relationship between the Formation of Indonesia’s Nation-State Identity and the Development of Nuclear Technologies, 1954–1966” in collaboration with Tiara Noor Pratiwi of Airlangga University.

Finally, Rachel Wurster, a graduate student in the Department of English, presented “Her World Her Way? An Exploration of Racial Depictions and Stereotypes in Seventeen Magazine.”