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Foodie Tuesday Lunar New Year

Tuesday, March 5, 5pm-7pm
Williams Village East Lobby

Open to all CU Boulder �鶹��Ժ

Learn to cook dumplings!

Red Enelopes!

Mahjong!

Anthropology of Japan Series: Affect and the Diversity of Feeling Bodies

Wed, Mar 6, 2024, 12:20-1:10pm MT, on Zoom

Register in advance: 

Daniel White

Associate Fellow, Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence, University of Cambridge; Grant Writer, Kōkua Kalihi Valley Comprehensive Family Services, Kalihi, HI

The global growth of interest in building machines with artificial emotional intelligence begs questions of who, what, and how things feel in our increasingly multispecies society. In Japan today, these questions are surprisingly entangled with how technologists interested in futures of human-machine coexistence are envisioning the concept of diversity. Familiar with critiques of the lack of diversity in AI, some companion robot producers have proposed that although the word “diversity” today refers to skin color, gender, and ethnicity, in the future it might equally refer to robots. Such propositions treat robots as agents deserving recognition in a diverse society—as kinds of persons that on account of their ability to offer total acceptance to others might earn social acceptance in return. While such propositions have stimulated new ideas about how diversity in a future society might be extended beyond human members, they have also raised concerns that a robot-inclusive diversity might come at the expense of other humans. This lecture considers the changing notions of diversity in Japan through an exploration of how engineers are translating human affect into machine-readable emotion.

Lecture on Tibetan Pastoralists as Analytical Agents and Screening of Documentary "Khata" | Huatse Gyal

Please join us for a lecture and new documentary film with Huatse Gyal, Rice University.

Film Screening of Khata: Purity or Poison? 

12:30pm on Friday, March 8 | Guggenheim 201E
Please RSVP via , lunch provided. Limited to 15.

This 45-minute film juxtaposes the sense of "purity" and good intentions behind the Tibetan tradition of offering long white scarves to religious teachers with the "pollution" of the environmental impacts of its mass proliferation. The film follows the proliferation of the custom in contemporary society and how scarves are now offered or otherwise employed in a variety of contexts, and colors. Huatse Gyal released his first feature-length documentary film in September 2023.

Tibetan Pastoralists as Analytical Agents: Epistemic Diversity, Documentary Filmmaking, and Collaborative Theorization 
3:30pm on Friday, March 8th in Guggenheim 205

Drawing on a group of Tibetan pastoralists’ efforts to make environmental documentary films as a means of creating alternative narratives of their relationship to their ancestral land, this talk details how documentary films produced by Tibetan pastoralists subtly challenge the power/knowledge structures and discourses through which they have been framed and known. The aim of this talk is to present how documentary filmmaking can serve as sites of theoretical production, decolonizing learning, and as well as community restoration efforts by blurring the conventional boundaries between theory vs. practice, analysts vs. informants, text-based scholarship vs. multimodal forms of knowledge production. In doing so, the talk crafts a larger argument about how ethnographic attention to different modes of knowledge production may offer us opportunities to participate in a process of collaborative theorization, where our interlocutors are not just information providers, but also analytical agents, knowledge producers, or image-makers alongside us.

Dr. Huatse Gyal is an anthropologist, writer, and filmmaker. He earned his B.A. in Anthropology from Reed College in 2013, and MA and Ph.D. in Anthropology from the University of Michigan in 2022. Dr. Gyal's work falls into three interrelated areas. First, Dr. Gyal explores the interdependent relationships between land, language, and community, focusing on state environmentalism and climate change, as well as an interdisciplinary approach to land-based indigenous revitalization movements in a global context. His scholarship and community service are deeply informed by Critical Indigenous Studies scholars who see revitalization of indigenous ways of relating to land and language as essential to the mission of empowering indigenous communities and unmaking settler colonialisms. Second, Dr. Gyal focuses on environmental anthropology. Drawing on Tibetan genres of land-based indigenous storywork, such as origin stories, sacred place narratives, traditional songs and folktales, epic stories, stories of nonhuman actors, ritual texts, as well as long-term ethnographic fieldwork in eastern Tibet, his current research analytically centers indigenous Tibetan pastoralists’ ways of theorizing and relating to their ancestral lands now jeopardized by large-scale rangeland fencing and resettlement policies. Third, Dr. Gyal is a visual anthropologist. He has been collaborating with a network of native/indigenous community artists, writers, and environmentalists in eastern Tibet, whose work strives to construct alternative narratives of Tibetan pastoralists’ relationality with their ancestral land through documentary films, paintings, children's books, and community-led land-restoration projects.

Standing for Humanity in Gaza and Israel

Part of a series of events in Colorado to raise awareness and offer pathways to staying informed, engaged, and active. The event will include a staged reading of "" written by Maya Arad Yasur, and poetry by Palestinian poets Taha Muhammad Ali and Refaat Alareer.

• March 10, 2024 at 7:30pm
• Roe Green Theatre, CU Boulder
• RSVP Required: 
• FREE!

What to Expect

The Play

The haunting 20-minute play "How to Remain a Humanist after a Massacre in 17 Steps" opens with a prologue set on the morning of October 7th, 2023. It then sharply transforms to a ‘how to’ course in maintaining humanity in the aftermath of barbarism, poignantly capturing the critical moment when everything changed for the people of Israel, Gaza, and way beyond, enforcing that essential reminder — ‘There are mothers on both sides.’  The play has been presented broadly in Europe, generating a widespread and profound emotional response. Ami Dayan directs a cast featuring Wendy Ishii, Tamara Meneghini, Lisa Bornstein, and Mari Brown.

Poetry & Panel Discussion

After the play, readings of poignant poems by Palestinian writers  (1931 - 2011) and  (1979 - 2023), who was killed in an IDF airstrike on December 6th, days after writing his renowned poem If I Must Die; setting the stage for a crucial Panel Discussion with local journalists, educators, political and faith leaders and the audience, about the world’s most combustible conflict.

Proceeds go to and .

Co-presented by the Center for Asian Studies, CU Boulder's Center for Humanities & the Arts (CHA), Department of Ethnic Studies, Department of Theatre & Dance, and Program in Jewish Studies.