Humanizing Acts: Researcher's Roundtable examines the gifts of resisting the historical erasure of the COVID-19 pandemic with community and research. This is the podcast component of Humanizing Acts: Resisting the Historical Erasures of the Global COVID-19 Pandemic across the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands.

It features series contributors Dan Bustillo, Amy Sanchez Arteaga and Misael Diaz (Cognate Collective), and Mario Alberto Obando, Jr.

This podcast has been edited and written by Mario Alberto Obando, Jr. and co-produced by Mario Alberto Obando, Jr. and Daniel Topete. Ana Elizabeth Rosas provided editorial support.

“Tracing Everyday Upheavals in the Middle East” is a multi-campus project that departs from grand totalizing narratives of upheaval by unearthing intimate histories, complex presents, and imagined futures from across the Middle East. Our main research question is: What are the different stories and narratives of upheaval that we can derive from everyday life?

This episode features a conversation between nine UC graduate students: Gehad Abaza, Banan Abdelrahman, Ingy Higazy, Mary Michael, Aida Mukharesh, Lalu Esra Ozban, Raed El Rafei, Salma Shash, Yasemin Taskin-Alp.

Learn more about this project at uchri.org/awards/tracing-everyday-upheavals-in-the-middle-east/

Music: Möbius Surface by escp-music.bandcamp.com/music

“Tracing Everyday Upheavals in the Middle East” is a multi-campus project that departs from grand totalizing narratives of upheaval by unearthing intimate histories, complex presents, and imagined futures from across the Middle East. Our main research question is: What are the different stories and narratives of upheaval that we can derive from everyday life?

This episode features a conversation between nine UC graduate students: Gehad Abaza, Banan Abdelrahman, Ingy Higazy, Mary Michael, Aida Mukharesh, Lalu Esra Ozban, Raed El Rafei, Salma Shash, Yasemin Taskin-Alp.

Learn more about this project at uchri.org/awards/tracing-everyday-upheavals-in-the-middle-east/

Music: Möbius Surface by escp-music.bandcamp.com/music

“Tracing Everyday Upheavals in the Middle East” is a multi-campus project that departs from grand totalizing narratives of upheaval by unearthing intimate histories, complex presents, and imagined futures from across the Middle East. Our main research question is: What are the different stories and narratives of upheaval that we can derive from everyday life?

This episode features a conversation between nine UC graduate students: Gehad Abaza, Banan Abdelrahman, Ingy Higazy, Mary Michael, Aida Mukharesh, Lalu Esra Ozban, Raed El Rafei, Salma Shash, Yasemin Taskin-Alp.

Learn more about this project at uchri.org/awards/tracing-everyday-upheavals-in-the-middle-east/

Music: Möbius Surface by escp-music.bandcamp.com/music

What is the role of humanities centers and institutes, and what can they do to spark change in graduate education? In this episode, we speak with our mentors, Dr. Barbara Mennel (UF CHPS) and Dr. Kelly Anne Brown (UCHRI), in a wide-ranging conversation about how humanities centers and institutes function as an incubator for intellectual and professional networks, hubs for experimental programming, and safe spaces for grad students. We discuss how underfunding the humanities might lead to a host of issues downstream, including space for cutting-edge scholarship. We also speak about distributed models of mentorship and how they can prepare students for multiple career paths.

Contact us at [email protected].

Given the crisis of declining student enrollments and tenure-track jobs, what is the role of scholarly organizations in facilitating systemic change? This episode, we speak with Dr. Joy Connolly about her role as president of the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS), where she works on fellowship design, change acceleration, and creating spaces for students, faculty, and administrators to craft a more sustainable future for the humanities. But first: A job ad that asks for too much and gives too little.

Contact us at [email protected].

Under Review Episode 4: Unwellness and the University (UCHRI X UF CHPS)

How do we create spaces of care for one another in structures that make us unwell? In this episode, we speak with Dr. Mimi Khuc, a writer, scholar, mental health advocate, and adjunct lecturer in disability studies at Georgetown University. We cover her advocacy for adjunct professors, mental health issues students face in grad school, the silencing of emotions in professional settings, and changing one’s career trajectory during the PhD. Plus, a sound experiment on how it feels to be contingent.

Contact us at [email protected].

The digital wave is sweeping the humanities, raising provocative new questions: Should podcasting count as a form of scholarship, and can the dissertation be other than a book-length monograph? In this episode, we visit the National Humanities Center’s virtual podcasting institute, where four PhD students (Lauren Cox, June Ke, Mirna Wasef, and Kevin Woram) met and collaborated on a podcast about digital intimacies during the 2020 lockdown. We caught up with them one year later. We also spoke with Andy Mink, Vice President of Education Programs at the National Humanities Center, about NHC’s programming for graduate students and the importance of interdisciplinary collaborations. Bonus: a meditative ASMR for graduate students.

Contact us at [email protected].

We need to talk about work, and what’s not working, in graduate school. Graduate students are instructors, teaching assistants, research assistants, and researchers, but our stipends are often not enough to make ends meet. First, we look back at the Columbia University graduate student strikes with Sourav Chatterjee, a PhD student at the Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies program at Columbia. Then we chat with Dr. Nick Mitchell, Professor of Ethnic Studies and Graduate Feminist Director at UC Santa Cruz, about the jobs crisis, academic labor as labor, the UCSC graduate strike, and what can and needs to change around working conditions in the academy.

Under Review is a podcast hosted by June Ke and Lauren Burrell Cox, two PhD students who ask questions about humanities graduate education. In the first episode, we spoke with Dr. Rachel Arteaga, Assistant Director of the Simpson Center for the Humanities at the University of Washington, and co-author of ‘We All Have Levers We Can Pull’: Reforming Graduate Education.” We spoke about what we can learn from community colleges, the “prestige economy” of higher ed, resistance to alt-ac career paths, and what can be done to reform graduate education today.

Episode resources here: https://humwork.uchri.org/blog/2022/04/under-review-episode-1/

Contact us at [email protected]