HSOC Speaker Series

Source Jenga: Misattribution, Forgery and Visual Epistemology

Monday, Sept. 14, 3:30 – 5 p.m. | Crosland G120, Wilby Classroom

Nick Wilding is a professor and associate chair of the Department of History at Georgia State University. His research focuses on early modern Europe, the history of science, and the history of the book.

Galileo’s contributions to natural philosophy have increasingly been understood alongside fields such as literature, music and, most importantly, the visual arts. One site from which the most influential iteration of this trend, known as visual epistemology, emerged, is Erwin Panofsky’s foundational essay ‘Galileo as a Critic of the Arts’ (1954), which positioned Galileo's aesthetics at the center of his scientific world. Looking afresh at the two core Galilean documents upon which Panofsky’s argument rests (a letter to a painter, and the Considerations on Tasso), however, leads to some inconvenient conclusions. Using a wide array of evidence, from codicology to AI stylometry, I hope to demonstrate that these are respectively an early forgery and a late misattribution. How and why should we remove primary sources, and what happens to canonical secondary studies when we do so?

Bodies of work, bodies that work: Immigration documents and the notion of the "corpus" on the migrant trail in Mexico

Monday, Oct. 12 3:30 – 5 p.m. | Crosland G120, Wilby Classroom

Levi Vonk is an assistant professor at the City University of New York. A medical anthropologist and creative nonfiction author, his work centers questions of the human and the body in relation to technological milieus, especially technologies that allow for border militarization and externalization.

In this talk, Vonk will return to the thought of Andre Leroi-Gourhan, a 20th-century French anthropologist and archaeologist, whose notion of “external organs” — those things “outside” (or extimate to) the body that structure its abilities — provides a means of bodily analysis that departs from individualist and normative biomedical categories. By focusing on the body as a corpus, that is, as a body of work, he claims immigration documents should be understood as actually structuring the notion of one’s organic body and individualized identity as such. He then uses the corpus to analyze two ethnographic moments while working with undocumented migrants in Mexico: one where migrants expressed that their bodies had “disappeared,” and another in which two brothers receive distinct immigration documents after putting their sexual identities to work in contrasting ways.

From Predatory Inclusion to Financial Estrangement: Debt Collection and the Stratification of Institutional Trust

Monday, Nov. 16 3:30 – 5 p.m. | Crosland G120, Wilby Classroom

Fred Wherry is the Townsend Marin, Class of 1917 Professor of Sociology at Princeton University, where he is also the Vice Dean for Faculty Development and Inclusion, and founder of the Debt Collection Lab.

Marie-Lou Laprise is a postgraduate research associate in the Department of Sociology at Princeton University. A quantitative and computational sociologist, she studies collective intelligence and the social impact of AI. 

Over a quarter of Americans report that their household has been contacted by a debt collector in the past year, and for many, this is their primary encounter with the institutions that enforce private claims. Building on the concepts of predatory inclusion and legal estrangement, we argue that civil debt enforcement constitutes a distinct, stratified pathway to institutional distrust—one that parallels and compounds the criminal justice pathway. We introduce the concept of financial estrangement to theorize how the terms of households' inclusion in credit markets shape their relations with the institutions that enforce private claims. Our concept of financial estrangement brings together concerns from economic sociology, law and society, criminal justice, and race and inequality, and applies them to the context of the marketplace for consumer debt. Drawing on an original probabilistic survey of 2,115 U.S. adults, we show that debt-collection contact is pervasive, racially unequal, and not reducible to differences in household income or financial hardship. Americans overwhelmingly find widespread debt-collection practices unfair, particularly those who have experienced them. Careful analysis reveals that debt-collection contact is associated with perceiving courts as rarely or never fair, even after accounting for hardship levels, income, race/ethnicity, and arrest history. These findings suggest that civil legal processes tied to mass debt contribute to race- and class-stratified patterns of institutional trust.