2026
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Monday, April 6, 2026 Olin Humanities, Room 205 5:00 pm EDT/GMT-4 This paper examines how urban planning, animal governance, and racial politics converge in the production of interspecies belonging in Singapore. Focusing on the category of the “Singapore Special”—a term used to describe local mongrel dogs—it traces how public housing policy, colonial legacies of environmental control, and racialized ideas of order shape the conditions under which dogs can become companions, citizens, a distinct breed, or threats. Drawing on ethnographic research with animal welfare groups, fosterers, and state-run facilities, alongside a personal account of attempting to recover a lost foster dog during the COVID-19 lockdowns, the paper explores how unruly animal lives are governed through bureaucratic classification, behavioral training, and spatial regulation. Recent shifts away from mass culling toward sterilization and rehoming programs appear to signal a more humane approach to animal care. Yet these interventions hinge on the transformation of “feral” dogs into governable subjects—requiring them to demonstrate proper conduct, emotional regulation, and adaptability within the tightly regulated spaces of public housing. The paper argues that these forms of canine governance mirror racialized modes of human belonging in Singapore, where access to housing, mobility, and security is mediated through administrative categories and ideals of civility. The production of the “Singapore Special” operates as a species analogue to bureaucratic citizenship, rendering care conditional and unevenly distributed. The paper shows how anxieties about urban unruliness are managed through the biopolitical regulation of animal bodies. It wrestles with the conditions under which significant otherness remains structurally excluded and the limits of companionship and care that do not accommodate refusal, flight, and ferality. |
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Thursday, February 26, 2026
A talk by Professor Katharina Galor
Reem-Kayden Center Laszlo Z. Bito '60 Auditorium 5:30 pm – 7:00 pm EST/GMT-5 This talk introduces Innocent Knowledge, a collaborative research and public humanities project centered on nearly four hundred drawings created by children ages five to fourteen across Gaza, the West Bank, and Israel between October 2024 and June 2025. Encountered together, the drawings render visible the radically unequal conditions under which childhood unfolds across the region. The lecture reflects on the project’s conceptual and ethical foundations: the decision to juxtapose Israeli and Palestinian children’s work without imposing narrative symmetry; the refusal to interpret individual images; the use of context rather than analysis to mediate meaning; and the implications of Article 12 of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child for visual expression in wartime. Taken together, the drawings invite us to consider what it means to treat children not as symbols of conflict, but as agents of testimony and presence. |
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Wednesday, February 25, 2026 Olin Humanities, Room 102 5:00 pm EST/GMT-5 This talk examines the place of psychiatry in the ever shape-shifting U.S. carceral state. It presents an ethnographic account of the Los Angeles Jail system’s mental health facility, the largest in the United States. Drawing on three years of ethnographic research inside LA’s jails, I explore how and why jail mental health care appears to only sustain and further individual and collective suffering. Bringing together a conjunctural analysis of the LA jail mental health care crisis and the pre-figurative possibilities of psychiatric utopianism demonstrated by the organizing inside and outside the jail, I describe jail mental health care as a terrain of psycho-politics. On this terrain, particular relationships harden and become the glue holding the jail together and enabling its reproduction, while struggles are simultaneously waged at its points of contradiction. This multi-leveled approach demonstrates how the jail is an institutional and ideological regime wherein a particular form of psychiatry is brought in to manage its recursive crises. It also offers a lens through which to understand efforts to interrupt carceral social reproduction. |