WINTER 2019 IHC FUNDING AWARD WINNERS

The IHC is pleased to announce the winners of its Winter 2019 awards applications. Congratulations to the winners of Graduate Collaborative and Visual, Performing, and Media Arts Awards!

GRADUATE COLLABORATIVE AWARD

Outlaw(ed) Intellectuals: Challenging Structures of Power from Within

Clint Terrell (English), Oscar F. Sotos (Sociology), Ma’Risa Salinas (Sociology), María Vasquez (Counseling and School Psychology)

“Outlaw(ed) Intellectuals” will be the first colloquium entirely made up of formerly incarcerated faculty, students, and community organizers from multiple disciplines and university campuses to convene at UC Santa Barbara. The purpose of the event is to bring awareness to the presence of formerly incarcerated students, faculty, and staff currently at UCSB. This exposure will be used to erect a student organization that will provide space and community for formerly incarcerated people on the UCSB campus. Additionally, we intend this to be a recurring event at UCSB to sustain a critical conversation around issues affecting formerly incarcerate people in academia.

Drawing Diversity: Identity, Organizing, and Imagining in Comics and Graphic Narratives

Maite Urcaregui, English
Radmila Stefkova, Spanish and Portuguese

The proposed project is a collaborative organization of a day-long symposium on Comics Studies, featuring scholarly panels, a workshop, and a keynote address. The symposium will address comics’ approach to the politics and poetics of representing the intersections of race, nationhood, gender, and sexuality among other social locations, as well as the unique storytelling capacity of sequential art. We hope to encourage scholarly dialogue centered around the issues of diversity and representation in comics. The event will invite a higher interest in comics studies and foster an intercampus research collaboration across the UC campuses.

VISUAL, PERFORMING, AND MEDIA ARTS AWARD

Maiza Hixson, Art, “CHIMERA”

CHIMERA is a science fiction play set in 2050 that centers around a love triangle and an artificially intelligent firefighting cyborg named AICH#805. Entertaining the fate of human existence in an era of climate change, the play discusses technological innovations that move us closer to “the singularity”—the moment when super-intelligent machines evolve without human assistance—as we simultaneously grapple with the more immediate threat of environmental collapse. Our main characters must reconcile the past and save humanity before being expelled from planet Earth.

Marshall Sharpe, Art, “Memory, Nostalgia, and Privilege in the South”

Ten, 60”x80” paintings will be created and displayed in a solo show at UC Santa Barbara. The paintings will focus on the life of Sharpe’s grandmother, Bell Mahan, who grew up in Memphis during the height of the Civil Rights Movement. Because Bell died before the artist was born, the work builds a bridge to a grandmother he never met. Using primary sources such as journals, family photographs, and interviews with individuals such as Rae Fichards, her lifelong, African-American maid, the work will unpack themes of memory, privilege, and nostalgia in the deep South.

Jungah Son, Media Arts and Technology, “Reconstruction of Kandinsky’s Teaching at the Bauhaus”

A media arts project to develop a real-time interactive analytical system for visual artists. The project will collect data mostly from art students, and to conduct this research, three techniques will be used to collect information: narrative observation, semi-structured interview, and a questionnaire. The main objective behind this project is to develop a user interface that helps artists observe the given scene precisely and express it visually based on Kandinsky’s teaching at the Bauhaus. The resulting dataset will be provided for future research and the results of this project will be shown in media art shows.