Research Focus Group Talk: Outside the Box: Cardboard in Contemporary Children’s Culture
2025-02-05 15:00 - 17:00 (America/Los_Angeles) | 3145 SSMS, 3145 SSMS, Santa Barbara, CA, 93106, United States
The cardboard box has long been regarded as the imaginative plaything par excellence. In 2005, the box was inducted into the Toy Association’s Toy Industry Hall of Fame at the Strong National Museum of Play in Rochester, NY—institutionalizing a decades-old association between cardboard and children’s creative play. On the page and onscreen, in museum galleries, schools, toy aisles, and at home, today cardboard occupies a privileged position within children’s material culture where the promises of environmental and STEAM education coalesce. Its accessibility makes it an equitable choice; its recyclability makes it a sustainable one. This talk will examine cardboard’s recent ascendence in children’s sustainability and STEAM cultures. Through a series of case studies, including documentary film, fiction, curricular materials and kids’ material cultures, it will identify the optimistic futures projected by proponents of cardboard play and interrogate their underpinning logics. Cardboard sits at the intersection between the local and the global in children’s everyday lives—at once emblematic of transnational flows of labor and capital and the material stuff of hyper-specific embodied engagements. As such, this talk will trace cardboard’s function as a material, discursive, and aesthetic phenomenon deployed to address—though not necessarily resolve—a range of concerns related to children’s economic, environmental, and educational futures.
Meredith A. Bak is an Associate Professor of Childhood Studies at Rutgers University-Camden. She is the author of Playful Visions: Optical Toys and the Emergence of Children’s Media Culture (MIT Press, 2020). Her work has appeared in journals including Ninth Letter, The Journal for Cinema and Media Studies, Early Popular Visual Culture, The Velvet Light Trap, and Film History, and in several edited collections. She is at work on a project about the role of cardboard in children’s STEAM and environmental pedagogies.
Cosponsored by the IHC’s Global Childhood Media Research Focus Group, Department of Film and Media Studies, the Carsey-Wolf Center, Graduate Center for Literary Research, and Comparative Literature Program, and the Interdisciplinary Humanities Center

Research Focus Group Talk: Inside Chinese Theater: Archive of the Invisible and the Sino-Soundscape in North America
2025-02-12 15:30 - 16:45 | McCune Conference Room, 6020 HSSB, Santa Barbara, CA, 93106, United States
The defining tunes of the Sinophone community in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were those of the Cantonese opera performed in Chinese theaters. This history has been invisible due to the scarcity of materials about Sinophone community in archives. The sonic imageries were also imprisoned by the mounting derision in English newspapers and travelogues. Drawing from the diary of a Chinese laborer to piece together the history of vibrant Chinese theaters, this talk offers readings against the grain to consider how archives structure our understanding of the past and frame how we enter into the present and future.
Nancy Yunhwa Rao is Distinguished Professor of Music at Rutgers University. Her work bridges musicology, music theory, and Sinophone and Inter-Asia studies. A member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, she is the author of Chinatown Opera Theater in North America. For The Cambridge Companion to Serialism, she contributed a chapter on East Asia. Her analysis of materiality in the sonic imagery of East-Asian composition recently appeared in Music Theory Spectrum. Rao currently serves as editor of the journal American Music. Her new book, Inside Chinese theater: Community and Artistry in Nineteenth-Century California and Beyond, will be published in March 2025.
Cosponsored by the IHC’s Interdisciplinary Sinophone Studies Research Focus Group, Department of Music, and UCSB’s Center for Taiwan Studies

Research Focus Group Talk: Conversing with the Afrofuture: An Evening with Nalo Hopkinson
2025-02-21 18:00 - 20:00 | Mosher Alumni Hall, Mosher Alumni House, UC Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA, 93106, United States
The Creative Critical Writing Initiative (housed in the English Department) welcomes Dr. Nalo Hopkinson for an upcoming talk, “Conversing with the Afrofuture: An Evening with Nalo Hopkinson.” Nalo Hopkinson is an author, Professor of Creative Writing at The University of British Columbia, and the 2021 Damon Knight Memorial Grand Master for lifetime achievement in science fiction and fantasy. Born in Jamaica, Dr. Hopkinson has taught, lived, and created across the Caribbean, the United States, and Canada, producing works that engage with disability, neurodiversity, queer Black feminist and womanist thought, Caribbean literature, folklore, & ecology, Afrofuturism, textile and doll-making praxis, and teaching. Dr. Hopkinson is known best for her works in speculative fiction—novels such as Brown Girl in the Ring, Midnight Robber, and Sister Mine represent only a fraction of Dr. Hopkinson’s contributions to Afrofuturist thought and art practice.
Join us this Winter quarter to welcome Dr. Hopkinson to UCSB. The event will include a moderated conversation, an audience Q&A, followed by a book-signing. Select titles will be available for purchase. We hope to see you there!
Cosponsored by the Hemispheric South/s Research Initiative, Las Maestras Center for Xican[x] Indigenous Thought, Art and Social Practice, Center for Feminist Futures, the American Cultures and Global Contexts Center, English, Film and Media Studies, Comparative Literature, Black Studies, Feminist Studies, the Transcriptions Center, the Writing Program, and the IHC’s Caribbean Studies Research Focus Group
