The Humanities Institute has announced its slate of events for the fall 2022 season, with a focus on art, culture, and creativity as means of community building. This year’s theme, “Propagating Cultural Power: Outward Mobility in the Age of Late-Stage Capitalism,” will explore how various cultural practices are used around the world as tools of dialogue, healing, and self- and community empowerment.
“This programming came from my desire to challenge the urgency of stepping back into our pace and way of life without questioning the systems that propel us,” said Martha Gonzalez, associate professor of Chicanx/Latinx Studies at Scripps, who is convening this year’s events. “Art and culture are the perfect tools for these discussions.”
The season will bring scholars, artists, and activists to campus for a series of public and participatory events, including master altar makers Ofelia Esparza and Rosanna Esparza Ahrens, who will discuss how ofrendas create sacred spaces for connections, and musicians, performers, and activists Michelle Téllez, Pablo Méndez Granadino and Vijay Gupta.
This semester’s guests are “people who see the building and strengthening of communities through art and cultural processes as critical and instrumental to our survival as human beings in the world,” Gonzalez said. The program’s theme, which will continue with the spring season’s events, is Gonzalez’s way of “centering not only intellectual discussions, but the ‘doing’ or embodied knowledge as well. Perhaps with these participatory gatherings and the critical questions the invitees ask us to consider, we might begin collective discussions. Like many, I believe another world is possible.”
Founded in 1986, the Scripps College Humanities Institute presents a thematic program on a topic related to the humanities. In the spirit of Scripps’ tradition of interdisciplinary education, programs include talks, readings, workshops, film screenings, performances, and art exhibitions from prominent and emerging scholars.