John Jackson, University of Pennsylvania -
John L. Jackson, Jr., is Dean of the School of Social Policy & Practice and Richard Perry University Professor at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of Harlemworld: Doing Race and Class in Contemporary Black America (University of Chicago Press, 2001); Real Black: Adventures in Racial Sincerity (University of Chicago Press, 2005); Racial Paranoia: The Unintended Consequences of Political Correctness (Basic Civitas, 2008); Thin Description: Ethnography and the African Hebrew Israelites of Jerusalem (Harvard University Press, 2013); Impolite Conversations: On Race, Politics, Sex, Money, and Religion, co-written with Cora Daniels (Atria/Simon & Schuster, 2014), and Televised Redemption: Black Religious Media and Racial Empowerment (NYU Press, 2016), co-written with Carolyn Rouse and Marla Frederick. His is also editor of Social Policy and Social Justice (2016), distributed by the University of Pennsylvania Press. His most recently completed film, co-directed with Deborah A. Thomas, is Bad Friday: Rastafari after Coral Gardens (Third World Newsreel, 2012).
Paper: Conspiracies and Demonic Identities in Contemporary Hip-hop Culture: Ten Short Stories of Racial Paranoia
Lochlann Jain, Stanford University -
S. Løchlann Jain is the author of two books, Injury (Princeton University Press, 2006) and Malignant: How Cancer Becomes Us (University of California Press, 2013). The latter won several prizes, including the Victor Turner Prize, the Edelstein Prize, the Diana Forsythe Prize, the Fleck Prize, and the Staley Prize. Jain is currently writing a book on the history of vaccine development, and developing pedagogical and ethnographic methods based in theater and art practice. Jain also maintains an art practice (www.cardsthatart.com).
Paper: Tastes Reasonable
Lisa Wedeen, University of Chicago -
Lisa Wedeen is currently co-director of 3CT. Her major areas of interest include comparative politics; the Middle East; political theory; feminist theory; and qualitative methods. Her publications include Ambiguities of Domination: Politics, Rhetoric, and Symbols in Contemporary Syria (1999); "Conceptualizing 'Culture': Possibilities for Political Science" (2002); "Concepts and Commitments in the Study of Democracy" (2004), Peripheral Visions: Publics, Power and Performance in Yemen (2008), "Ethnography as an Interpretive Enterprise" (2009), "Reflections on Ethnographic Work in Political Science" (2010), and "Ideology and Humor in Dark Times: Notes from Syria" (2013).
She is the recipient of the David Collier Mid-Career Achievement Award and an NSF fellowship. She is currently working on a book about ideology, neoliberal autocracy, and generational change in present-day Syria.
Paper: Authoritarian Apprehensions