UO Today

Based on five years of ethnographic research, Allison Pugh offers a humanistic response to the rise of AI, one that probes the profound meaning of human connection, reckons with the challenges of seeing and being seen, and reimagines what we know of ourselves and others in light of the automation challenge.

Allison Pugh is a professor of Sociology at Johns Hopkins University. She writes about how people forge connections and find meaning and dignity at work and at home. In her latest book The Last Human Job: The Work of Connecting in a Disconnected World (2024), Pugh develops the concept of “connective labor,” the collaborative work of emotional recognition. This includes three key components—empathetic listening, emotion management, and the act of “witnessing,” in which one individual reflects what they have seen and heard. Drawing on years of interview and observational data, Pugh shows how in sectors like education, healthcare, and therapy, this work is increasingly systemized—a process that she argues makes it ripe for eventual mechanization. In the face of teacher shortages and hype around “chatbot therapists,” Pugh makes a case for connective labor’s value to society and the potential consequences for inequality should it become a scarce commodity.

David Wacks, Romance Languages, and 2024–25 OHC Faculty Research Fellow.

In this project I study medieval translations, chronicles, legends, and plays based on the Hebrew Bible from the Iberian Peninsula’s three religious traditions. I show how Muslim, Jewish, and Christian authors draw on shared languages and traditions, stage the religious polemics of the day, and how, under the surveillance of the Spanish Inquisition, clandestine Jews and Muslims read their own traditions into Christian retellings of the Hebrew Bible.

Allison Pugh is professor of Sociology at Johns Hopkins University and author of "The Last Human Job: The Work of Connecting in a Disconnected World." She talks about the importance of connective labor, the collaborative work of emotional recognition. She will give a talk "Re-imagining the Other/Ourselves: Finding the Human in the Age of AI" on April 17, 2025.

Research Notes:

Melissa Graboyes, History, University of Oregon, and director of the Global Health Research Group, talks about she includes undergraduate students in her research endeavors in global health and the history of malaria.

Nicholas Forster is an assistant professor of Cinema Studies at the University of Oregon. He talks about his interest in cinema and Black performance, and the book he is writing about Bill Gunn, an unsung hero of Black filmmaking.

Research Notes:

Stephen Rodgers is the Edmund A. Cykler Chair in Music and Professor of Music Theory and Musicianship at the School of Music and Dance at the University of Oregon. He talks about his project: Art-Music-Performance—a mobile performance and exhibition space.

Parmida Mostafavi is an assistant professor of Anthropology who studies the connections between race, capital, and consumerism, with a focus on the material culture of the Iranian diaspora.

Research Notes (26:34): Lanie Millar, associate professor of Spanish and Portuguese, discusses her book "Forms of Disappointment. Cuban and Angolan Narrative After the Cold War" (SUNY Press, 2019), which argues that late 20th and early 21st century Cuban and Angolan novels enact a poetics of disappointment: narrative techniques which constitute a new formal and affective relationship to the histories of revolution shared across the South Atlantic.

Olivia Wing, PhD candidate, History, and 2024–25 OHC Dissertation Fellow.

By the late 1960s Asian American youth played a central role in the creation of a pan-Asian American political identity. My dissertation seeks the pre-1960s origin of youth’s increasing prominence in the creation of Asian American cultural citizenship by examining intersections of youth, gender, and leisure/recreation. Charting the trajectory of Chinese and Japanese American youth involvement in beauty pageants, sports, and public celebrations, my project uncovers regional histories of community formation and representation that contextualize later interethnic tension and coalition.

Eleanor Paynter is a scholar, teacher, poet, and Assistant Professor of Italian, migration, and global media in the School of Global Studies and Languages at the University of Oregon. She discusses her book "Emergency in Transit: Witnessing Migration in the Colonial Present"(https://www.ucpress.edu/books/emergency-in-transit/paper), her teaching, and what attracted her to the UO.

The chapbook on tanks she mentioned is out of print, but a related piece is still up here at Diagram https://thediagram.com/16_2/paynter.html

Another chapbook is here: https://dulcetshop.myshopify.com/products/oceano-eleanor-paynter

Here's the podcast I hosted at Cornell: https://open.spotify.com/show/1uu5mmNxbVdJUJgZwXAeK4

Research Notes (24:15):

Christopher Chávez is the Carolyn S. Chambers Distinguished Professor of Advertising and the director of the Center for Latina/o and Latin American Studies at the University of Oregon. He discusses his new book "Isle of Rum: Havana Club, Culutral Mediation and the Fight for Cuban Authenticity." (https://www.rutgersuniversitypress.org/delaware/isle-of-rum/9781978838833/)

Candace Bond-Theriault discusses the need to center LGBTQIA+ communities in the conversation about reproductive health, rights, and justice. Bond-Theriault asserts that for reproductive justice to be truly successful, we must acknowledge that members of the LGBTQIA+ community often face distinct, specific, and interlocking oppressions when it comes to these rights. Family formation, contraception needs, and appropriate support from healthcare services are still poorly understood aspects of the LGBTQIA+ experience, which often challenge mainstream notions of the nuclear family.

Candace Bond-Theriault, JD., LL.M. is a queer lawyer, writer, mother, and social justice advocate working at the intersections of law, policy, reproductive health rights, racial justice, LGBTQIA+ liberation, economic justice, and democracy reform. She is Adjunct Professor of Sociology and Criminology at Howard University, and Senior Director of Policy at the Black Women’s Health Imperative.

Her book Queering Reproductive Justice: An Invitation (2024), blends advocacy with a legal, rights-based framework and offers a unified path for attaining reproductive justice for LGBTQIA+ people.

Aycan Akçamete is an assistant professor of Comparative Literature and Theatre Arts at the University of Oregon. She talks about her book project "Staging Turkey at Arcola Theatre: Intercultural Networks and Cosmopolitan Spectatorship" and her teaching.

Research Notes:

Mattie Burkert is an associate professor of English and Digital Humanities, and author of "Speculative Enterprise: Public Theaters and Financial Markets in London, 1688–1763" (University of Virginia Press, 2021)

https://londonstagedatabase.uoregon.edu

https://www.r18collective.org

Patty Krawec is an Anishinaabe/Ukrainian writer and speaker belonging to the Lac Seul First Nation in Treaty 3 territory in Ontario, Canada. She is author of "Becoming Kin: An Indigenous Call to Unforgetting the Past and Reimagining Our Future."