Fenwick Fellows Lecture Series

Tuesday, April 8, 2025 2:00 PM to 4:00 PM EDT
Fenwick Library, 2001

Please join us on April 8th, 2-4 p.m. in the Fenwick Library Main Reading Room, when Jesse Kirkpatrick (Acting Director of the Institute for Philosophy and Public Policy and professor in the Department of Philosophy), Huwy-min Lucia Liu (Director of graduate programs in anthropology), and Amaka Okechukwu (professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology) will discuss their research findings from their fellowships.

Jesse Kirkpatrick 
Al Strategies: Cultural and Institutional Shaping of Global Al Infrastructures and Security Implications 
Abstract: This talk explores how cultural values and institutional priorities influence the development of artificial intelligence (Al) infrastructures on national and global scales. By examining economic and cultural determinants across different countries, this project aims to better understand how these factors shape Al strategies and their subsequent effects on national and international security. Drawing insights from a three-year, $1.39 million research project supported by the Department of Defense, the discussion will shed light on the comparative contexts of Al and their implications for global security dynamics. 

Huwy-min Lucia Liu
Governing Nature in China: The Emergence of the Chinese National Park System
Abstract: In 2021, the Chinese government inaugurated its first five national parks. Intriguingly, China had already established a variety of protected areas prior to this. As such, the creation of the Chinese national park system is not a story of a new environmental commitment to conservation. Instead, it reflects the emergence of a new approach to governing nature in China. This project explores what the Chinese national park system is, how it has come into being, and why at this particular time, aiming to understand both how nature is governed in China and how this governance has evolved. 

Amaka Okechukwu
Black Belt Brooklyn: Mapping Community Building and Social Life during the Urban Crisis 
Abstract: A digital humanities project that aims to map, illustrate, and historicize Black practices of resistance, mutual aid, institution building, and vitality in Central Brooklyn during the 1970s and 1980s. Using Black spatial production (or an emplaced "making a way out of no way") Black residents articulate a Black spatial experience counter to official geographies and understandings of urban space. This project, a digital component of an in-process book manuscript, aims to push scholarly and popular understandings of the period of urban decline, and particularly conclusions generated about Black agency and cultural responses to urban decline, in order to provide a nuanced interpretation grounded in oral history, archival, visual, and spatial evidence of Black life. Soft launched at the end of 2020 with a fellowship from the University of Maryland's African American Digital Humanities Initiative, I continued to develop and expand the project with the Fenwick Fellowship during the 2021-2022 academic year.