Many of these opportunities are streamed through Zoom. All 91探花faculty, staff, and students have access to?.?

Maysoon Zayid – Survival of the Unfittest

October 26, 6:30 PM | Meany Performing Arts Center

Join comedian, disability advocate, and author Maysoon Zayid for “Survival of the Unfittest.” This one-hour talk will tackle everything from diversity to cats named Beyonce through Maysoon’s humorous lens.

Maysoon is a graduate of and a Guest Comedian in Residence at Arizona State University. She is a Princeton University Arts Fellow for 2021-23 and will begin two years of teaching and community collaboration in September. Maysoon is the co-founder/co-executive producer of the New York Arab American Comedy Festival and The Muslim Funny Fest.? She was a full-time On Air Contributor to?Countdown with Keith Olbermann?and a columnist for The Daily Beast. She has most recently appeared on Oprah Winfrey Networks?In Deep Shift, 60 Minutes, and?ABC News. Maysoon had the most viewed TED Talk of 2014 and was named 1 of 100 Women of 2015 by BBC.

Free | Register & More info

Working, Together: “Troublesome Questions” Organizing in Higher Ed

October 27, 6:00 – 7:30 PM?|

BOOK TALK: Automation and Autonomy: Labour, Capital and Machines in the Artificial Intelligence Industry

October 28, 4:00 PM |

Join the Harry Bridges Center for Labor Studies and author James Steinhoff as we discuss his recent book, “Automation and Autonomy: Labour, Capital and Machines in the Artificial Intelligence Industry” (Palgrave Macmillan, 2021).

The book argues that Marxist theory is essential for understanding the contemporary industrialization of the form of artificial intelligence (AI) called machine learning. It includes a political economic history of AI, tracking how it went from a fringe research interest for a handful of scientists in the 1950s to a centerpiece of cybernetic capital fifty years later. It also includes a political economic study of the scale, scope and dynamics of the contemporary AI industry as well as a labour process analysis of commercial machine learning software production, based on interviews with workers and management in AI companies around the world, ranging from tiny startups to giant technology firms.

Free |

Anne Gould Hauberg Artist Images Series featuring Juan Alonso-Rodríguez

October 28, 4:30 PM |?Online

Tony Geist, On Translating Poetry: Treading the Line between the Excessively Literal and the Excessively Liberal

October 29, 12:30 – 2:00 PM?| Online

Looking for more?

Check out UWAA’s Stronger Together web page for?more digital engagement opportunities.

says that comics — especially superhero tales — hooked him and “rewired” his brain at an early age. They also got him drawing his own comics, chronicling his life and the things he observes.

Now Alaniz, a 91探花 professor of Slavic languages and literature, and of comparative literature, has published a collection of his own drawings and essays. “,” which borrows its name from the Superman world, was published earlier this year by Amatl Comix.

Alaniz grew up the son of Mexican-American farmworkers. “I got from comics something I could not obtain in any other way. Not even from television and movies,” he said. “A world of my own, private, portable, accessible and extendable with the flip of a page.”

91探花Notebook, a longtime fan of cartooning, caught up with Alaniz with a few questions about his work and the new book.

You grew up loving comics. How and when did you begin cartooning? Who were your influences??

José Alaniz: Maybe it sounds odd, but the very first comics I ever received — my mother probably got them for me at a convenience store — have had the deepest and most enduring impact on my own art style. “The Defenders #15” and “Marvel Two-In-One #5” (September, 1974) were both drawn by , Marvel’s most reliable and prolific artist of that era. Some think he followed the conventions of the Marvel house style too slavishly, though the dynamism and predictability of his line served as the perfect introduction for a child into the wild and wacky imaginative world of superhero comics. (Who can say, but I don’t know that I would have responded the same way to the art of or , two more highly-regarded artists at the time, had I encountered them first.)

Later, in 1975, Buscema took over the art on The Incredible Hulk, a character to which I have a near-life-long devotion and whose adventures I followed fanatically every month until my mid-30s. I basically formed as a person reading Hulk comics drawn by Buscema. To this day my art owes a debt to him. A later artist, (famous especially for his work on The in the 1980s) also played a role.

How would you briefly describe the collection, spanning your career as a cartoonist so far? Who is its audience?

J.A.: I feel gratified that some of the early responses to the book have borne this out: The collection has a lot of range in art style and tone, from tragedy to tragicomedy to documentary to black humor. I thought it important to highlight the different approaches to comics I’ve undertaken over the years. As Cleveland comics writer once said, “You can do anything with words and pictures.”

As for audience, I hope anyone who likes comics will pick it up.?

Longtime readers can see subtle changes in a cartoonist’s work over many years — the look of Snoopy’s nose in “Peanuts,” say, or Michael Doonesbury’s hair. How has your work changed over the years in ways only you and close readers would see?

J.A.: This collection is comprised of strips I did in college all the way up to work I’ve done over the last few years, when I picked up cartooning again. That happened because of my participation in , the monthly comics-making meet-up at Café Racer.

I think I’ve gotten better at using a brush, rather than just pen and ink, which I used exclusively in the early days. It did feel odd and wonderful to draw Chip, the main character of the Phantom Zone trilogy, again after about 20 years. (I started this story in the early ’90s and dropped it in the late ’90s.)

Overall, though, I’d say I’m a stronger writer than artist. I hope so, anyway.

There is a scrapbook-like quality to some of the material. One layout, “Planet of the Zooters,” consists of photos of a costumed couple with what looks like a musical score beneath. Could you explain that a little??

J.A.: You can do anything with words and pictures, and those words can be missing and those pictures don’t have to be drawn. Comics can tell any story and come from any source of inspiration. “Planet of the Zooters” started as a total goof. My future wife Kristin and I, back on Halloween, 2015, were taking pictures of ourselves in our costumes in front of the famous Gum Wall by Pike Place Market. We conscripted a passerby to take our photos together. (Thank you, whoever you are.) Looking at those photos later, I saw the basics of a plot about an astronaut stranded on a planet of zoot-suiters. With the critical assistance of my technical advisor Valerie Niemeyer — a much better artist than me, by the way — I put the story together in Photoshop.

I knew I wanted to go wordless, with a “musical accompaniment”: the notes to Lalo Guerrero’s 1949 song “ from the height of the zooter era, so I had 30 seconds of the song professionally rendered into musical notes. For the comics’ look, I mashed together a zine aesthetic with that of a Mexican fotonovela by printing out the pictures and photocopying them over and over at high contrast, until the texture looked right. Then I added a starry background and planets because, you know: sci-fi. It’s all so insufferably conceptualist. ??

There is cartooning as journalism here as well — scenes you observe in daily life or, in one case, stories of people visiting a free clinic. What are the challenges and rewards of this kind of on-the-scene work??

J.A.: I have a lot of experience as a journalist. I think it was Truman Capote who said that a journalism career is like getting a free public education in many subjects.

I like artists like and , who practice a form of comics journalism that’s more observational and personal, right on that line where memoir meets reportage. ‘s “Not a Place To Visit” is another good example, as is a new anthology I contributed to, “,” on the immigration issue.

I’m embracing that approach more in my current comics project, tentatively titled “Fronteras de Fierro: Life on the Border in the Age of Walls.” I’m using interviews, on-the-scene reporting and my own memories of growing up in the Rio Grande Valley of South Texas to convey a sense of how the border wall has impacted the culture and environment there, especially since the 1990s.

Among other things, I narrate and illustrate the struggles of people who own land on the river, whose property is under threat of being cut off by the new wall construction; plus the history of environmentalist activism in the valley and the effect of the wall on Native American and U.S. veterans’ cemeteries.

Comics are a versatile medium; unlike video or photography, you can tailor the artwork so that your reader is guided to a particular point you’re trying to make; you can eliminate what’s extraneous. Of course, that puts a lot of responsibility on the artist to choose what’s important.

Cartooning is a world of diversity beyond that represented in daily newspaper comics. Who are a few cartoonists from under-represented populations whose work you particularly like??

J.A.: You can’t really talk about US alternative comics without mentioning the (Mario, Beto and Jaime) and their seminal ongoing series .

That they’re Mexican-Americans from southern California both matters and doesn’t matter for appreciating their brilliant work. Way before “Planet of the Zooters,” they were bringing together myriad influences from Chicanx culture, sci-fi, pop, punk, comics and so much more.

Others I admire include the disabled British artist ; Mexican-American pioneer comic strip artist ; the Mexican conceptualist artist , author of the extraordinary graphic novel , who has Latinx heritage; Seattle artist , a fellow émigré to Seattle from Texas’ Rio Grande Valley; and Seattle’s own , whose work in intersectional, queer and disabled representation in comics has no serious rival.

For more information, contact Alaniz at jos23@uw.edu.

Closing Reception for ALTAR: Ritual, Prayer, Offering

November 22, 6:30 – 8:30 pm | Jacob Lawrence Gallery

Altars are often erected to pay homage to an ancestor or to honor (a) God or a saint. This exhibition takes the altar out of its religious context and interrogates photography as a practice containing the same attributes as altars. The images presented in this exhibition examine?several traditions that have originated in and/or are practiced on the African continent and throughout the world.

ALTAR?is on view from November 15 – 22 at Jacob Lawrence Gallery in the Art Building.

Free, RSVP encouraged?|

Shadows Crossing: Tones of Voice Continued

November 20, 6:30 pm | Burke Museum

Join the Burke Museum for an evening with poet Cedar Sigo, featured lecturer with the Bagley Wright Lecture Series on Poetry.?Cedar Sigo was raised on the Suquamish Reservation and studied at The Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at the Naropa Institute.?This lecture will attempt to uncover acoustic aspects of Sigo’s poetry, addressing how components of singing, storytelling and texts by visual artists have formed his path.

Works by Charles Reznikoff, Joy Harjo, Eileen Myles, Pitseolak, Gertrude Stein, dg Okpik, and Philip Guston will be shared and discussed.

The first floor galleries will be open during the event, and books are available for purchase along with author signing.

Free, RSVP encouraged?|

Politics is for the Dogs: Diogenes the Cynic and Political Refusal

Gabriel Kahane with School of Music faculty

Free?|?

Indigo Mist

A wild-eyed television preacher, uncensored public access nuttiness, even a young Ellen DeGeneres featured on a — when had students explore the history of local television for a class, they sure found a lot of good stuff.

The students, about 40 in all, conducted this media scavenger hunt for a spring quarter class called Television History, taught by Groening, an assistant professor in the . Groening will teach the class again in spring of 2017.

And what the students found — through online searches and explorations of 91探花Libraries extensive Special Collections — will live beyond the classes in an online archive Groening has created called the .

The archive’s stated mission is to be an open-ended, publicly accessible research project “aimed at recovering, archiving and publicizing the local history of television in Seattle” and to serve as a site for original scholarship on the history of television.

That involves much more than just the old programs themselves. The archive is interested in press coverage of TV, television clubs and viewing parties as well as “the people of television — on-air talent, camera operators, producers, editors and interns — (who) all contribute to television culture and history.”

Items the students found are not just on the entertainment side, such as a or an exploration of the work of locals , they dug into serious local history as well.

Other exhibits in the growing archive are about:

• the as seen through Seattle TV
• media of the death of Nirvana lead singer Kurt Cobain
• the experiences of the channel, and
• the broadcasting Seattle over the years

The Seattle Television History Project is supported with funding from the Department of Comparative Literature, Cinema & Media and the , enabling the archive to stream the contents of the exhibits and continue to add more exhibits as they come in.

Groening invites contributions to the archive. He also hopes to find funding for a subsequent project about the interconnections between local television and Seattle activism over the decades.

Beyond shows and the people who created or covered them, the archive also seeks to include the viewer experience.

Because we historically have watched TV privately in our homes, “the stories of television viewers have yet to be told,” notes from the site state. “Giving voice to specific viewer experiences is a crucial contribution to the history of media, cultural history and social history.”

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For more information, contact Groening at groening@uw.edu.

is a scholar of modern literary and visual culture, with a special interest in China from 1949 to the present. During his tenure as a Guggenheim fellow, Braester will work on three book projects. “Cinephilia Besieged: Film, National History, and Global Consciousness in the People’s Republic of China” traces the development of debates on film in the republic since 1949. “Screen City: Beijing and the Culture of Emergence” explores how cities, and Beijing in particular, are fashioned in new media as emerging environments. “Zhang Yimou: The Director and His Films” will offer the first book-length introduction in English to the now-famous director.

, holder of the Joan and Richard Komen Endowed Chair, studies the control and dynamics of movement in biology using concepts from neuroscience, engineering and mathematics. He’s previously been named a MacArthur Fellow and received the 91探花awards of excellence for teaching and graduate mentor. During his tenure as a Guggenheim fellow he will be working on three projects. One will be an online laboratory manual for “animal engineering,” which will complement his educational and research interests in biomechanics.? The other is the development of open source computational codes for understanding the molecular basis of force generation in muscle.