The Kindness of Strangers: Bhandary seeks to make caregiving disparities visible
During the pandemic, many of us have relied on the kindness of strangers. The work of people we didn’t know—store clerks, nurses, childcare providers, delivery people, and warehouse workers—allowed many of us to stay home during the past two years. This reliance may have helped us in the short run, but it’s not necessarily the best societal approach to receiving care. Frontline workers are inordinately female and people of color. Those whose work is most focused on caring for the dependent, such as the elderly, disabled, and very young, are largely women of color—the members of our society who provide the most care, while receiving the least.
Asha Bhandary (Philosophy, CLAS) is a political philosopher and feminist ethicist whose work is dedicated to developing a new form of liberal social contract theory that addresses the human need for dependency care. In her first book, Freedom to Care: Liberalism, Dependency Care, and Culture (Routledge, 2020), Bhandary addresses the injustice baked into our current caregiving arrangements. By naturalizing the belief that caretaking is a feminine role, while also devaluing the work of caretakers, we are mired in a system that accepts that some people will provide more care than others, and that some are more deserving of care.
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New Resources Page on Obermann Site
We've finally put all of our how-to guides in one, virtual place. Visit our Guides page for friendly tutorials about publicizing events, planning a symposium, adding events to online calendars, links to inclusive events guides, as well as our very own project decision-making tool.
Soon we'll begin working on a Funding Resources page; stay tuned!
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Working with a Literary Agent
Two scholars offer practical advice
Last year, two University of Iowa faculty members, Carrie Schuettpelz and Meenakshi Gigi Durham, shared with us their experiences of working with a literary agent. Since then, Schuettpelz's manuscript, The Indian Card, a narrative exploration of the role of federal rosters, genealogy websites, and blood quantum policies on tribal enrollment and the future of Native identity and sovereignty, was bought at auction by Flatiron Books.
If you weren't able to make it last year, we invite you to give this conversation a listen. It's filled with practical advice from two scholars who have successfully shared their work with mainstream audiences.
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New Wide Lens Series
Inspiration & exchange across the disciplines
For the last two years, many of us have deeply missed the good company of our colleagues. It was this desire for camaraderie and inspiration that led the College of Liberal Arts & Sciences, the Obermann Center for Advanced Studies, the Office of the Vice President for Research, and the Stanley Museum of Art to invent the new Wide Lens presentation and networking series.
For each gathering in the 2022–23 series, researchers, scholars, and/or artists from across the university will briefly present their work on a shared topic of interest, and then open the floor to questions and conversation over hors d'oeuvres and drinks at the Stanley Museum of Art.
Says Obermann Center director Teresa Mangum, "We hope this series will inspire new ideas and possible collaborations across campus, but the other organizers and I especially look forward to seeing old friends, welcoming new folks to campus, and toasting our brave colleagues taking on the rapid-fire pecha kucha presentation style!"
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Art Historian Spent Summer Focused on Iowa's Childcare Shortage |
Matt Bowman is a PhD student in Art & Art History who studies art of the American West and Southwest throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. For his Obermann Humanities for the Public Good summer internship, Matt wanted to explore topics and workspaces far afield from his academic milieu. He was paired with the Iowa City Area Business Partnership, which serves as the voice of business for Johnson County, Iowa, uniting businesses and communities to maintain a strong economy and quality of life.
Specifically, Matt helped Jennifer Banta, Vice President for Advocacy and Community Development, on an initiative to bring affordable childcare to our area. This month, Jennifer is one of the speakers in our Obermann Conversation, "A Crisis of Care: Iowa's Child Care Predicament." Matt shared the work he did last summer in a short video, which is also an excellent primer on the childcare landscape. Graduate students who are interested in Summer 2023 HPG internships can look for information early next semester.
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Awards, Accomplishments, & Other Happy News |
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Caleb Pennington (HPG intern) was awarded a grant from the Lepage Center at Villanova University for his dissertation project, "A Twentieth-Century Climate Diaspora," which examines the negative cultural perception that labor unions and members of the working classes have of environmentalists, and how that perception was co-opted by industry leaders in the '70s and '80s.
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Jason Radley ('19 Fellow-in-Residence) co-authored a study identifying neural pathways that govern the human stress response. The paper was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and was recently covered by Iowa Now.
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Lina-Maria Murillo (Working Groups) was awarded the 2023 Catharine Stimpson Prize for Outstanding Feminist Scholarship by the journal Signs for her article, “Espanta Cigüeñas: Abortion in the Years before Roe v. Wade.”
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