Friday, April 8, 2011
8:30-9:30am
Conrad A. Elvehjem Building, L160
Dr. Hanna Rose Shell, assistant professor in The Program in Science, Technology, and Society at MIT, will be the keynote speaker at the 2011 Mid-America American Studies Association annual conference, being held April 7-10, 2011. Please come to what is sure to be a facscinating and timely talk. Below is an abstract of the lecture:
"Clothing, almost by definition, is a circulating technology that is also a medium of social transmission: material culture par excellence. It is both the means and the site for storage and the spread, and the withholding, of information. Clothes are made to be carried by the human body (as in the French porter and the Haitian Creole pote) as the body moves through space, time and life in the world. From their origins in the first days of human culture and into the twenty-first century, textile skins were portable artifacts and temporary prostheses, material culture shaped by the demands of a mobile body and inscribed with markers of that body’s history. The demands on clothing have always been high – armor (protection against shame, enemies, and the elements) and aesthetics, comfort and durability. The portability of clothing, and its proximity to the human body, means that it is also changeable. Clothes are technologies in continual flux. As this keynote lecture will argue, recycled clothes wear the traces and bear the burdens of an increasingly global history of American material culture." --Hanna Rose Shell
Looking forward to this!
ReplyDeleteHere's the link to her movie about secondhand clothing that makes its way to Haiti:
ReplyDeletehttp://web.mit.edu/~hrshell/www/secondhand.html
Keynote speakers are often selected for raising interest in a particular event, it may be a conference or large meeting sponsored by a corporation, association or draw attendees to attend that program.
ReplyDeletekeynote speaker