Neubauer Collegium for Culture and Society

In postindustrial, knowledge-driven societies, where symbols replace widgets, we need new concepts about consumption and lifestyle, in addition to work. Scenes are one such concept. Scenes build on aesthetics, which we incorporate with social science concepts and methods. People’s aesthetics inform their consumption, and define 15 scenes dimensions, like localism, egalitarianism, self-expression, and transgression. This project studied scenes as geographic units, with physical facilities, and people as consumer/participants in activities like concerts. It measured scenes with amenities like churches and museums from censuses, electronic yellow pages, and citizen surveys. These combine in 15 scenes dimensions for some 40,000 US zipcodes, and local units studied with collaborators in Canada, Spain, France, Korea, Japan, China, Poland, and Germany.

To build deeper connections between scenes and the arts, key scenes participants were brought to the University of Chicago campus to present work to date–including seven monographs. University of Chicago faculty added more arts focus to build sharper analyses, such as how bohemian scenes encourage some artistic activities and localism encourages others. The product was a volume comparing scenes internationally.

This research project seeks to understand the process of becoming urban at a critical time in Cambodian history. Combining traditional and distributed ethnographic methods, the research team will explore and analyze the lived experiences of migrants from rural villages to urban centers; the economic, environmental, and social factors that drove the decision to migrate; and the changing connections to place, space, and people that result from becoming urban. Ultimately, the project aims to produce a deeper understanding of the lived experience of migrants and a better account of their transformation from villagers to urbanites.

The Black Wall Street Journey (BWSJ) project brought together the visual arts, social science survey research, and community engagement to study the economic and social health of several neighborhoods on Chicago’s South Side. The research team's work centered on producing the content of Houston-based artist Rick Lowe’s “Stock Tickers,” sculptural interventions distributed in select Chicago neighborhoods in the summer of 2021 as part of Toward Common Cause, a multi-site exhibition organized by the Smart Museum of Art at the University of Chicago and presented on the occasion of the 40th anniversary of the MacArthur Foundation’s Fellows Program. The BWSJ research team sought to better understand residents’ perspectives of their neighborhoods and to project this information through the sculptures Lowe created during his residency as a Neubauer Collegium Visiting Fellow. The challenge was three-fold: 1) to design and conduct a sociological study that conceptualizes, gathers, and analyzes data on the focal neighborhoods’ economic and social health; 2) to determine, with residents, what kind of information might be of use to residents of disenfranchised neighborhoods; and 3) to make those data legible in artistic form. The creation of the data, and the tracking of reactions to and engagement with the sculptures, provided social science insights into how community is perceived, described, and documented. The sculptures are a new source of information that constitutes value and facilitates decision-making by residents of low-income, historically divested communities.

This effort, a cross-disciplinary collaboration between machine-learning experts and those with expertise in social theory and ethnography, aims to investigate the predictability of human behavior in the context of criminal infractions transpiring in the city of Chicago. The project also aims to investigate the social and ethical issues that arise from enhanced methods of prediction. The project uses as its database the detailed spatio-temporal logs of reported criminal infractions publicly available from the City of Chicago Data Portal. Sophisticated machine-learning algorithms will be deployed to automatically infer predictive generative models, with the ultimate objective of gaining deeper understanding of the temporal evolution of complex social structures. Participants aim to assemble the vast number of local models they infer into a predictive causality network that resides live online, ingesting data as it updates and projecting predicted incidence risks across the city. Any predictability that the project successfully distills from the data raises epistemological questions about human behavior, culpability, and the societal share of responsibility for individual actions. Key issues pertain to the social origin of biases, particularly in a culturally, economically, and ethnically diverse urban environment, and even what we mean by a “systemic bias.” Related questions concern how to identify, quantify, understand, and mitigate such issues. For example, does aggressive selective surveillance, including that driven by predictive algorithms, simply lead to higher opportunity of getting caught, and hence to higher crime rates, thereby bringing to fruition self-fulfilling prophecies of specific communities being more crime-prone? Or does unbiased opportunity to commit crime, resulting from larger societal forces, drive such dynamics? How can we design systems that mitigate crime while at the same time limiting these feedback loops? More broadly, the project will attempt to interpret predictive models/algorithms of normative human behavior and investigate the extent to which interpretation is important for crafting policy informed by such predictive analytics.

Ever since the 2008 financial crisis, the strategy of governing the macro economy primarily through the management of money and financial markets while ceding most of society’s investment to the private sector has been in retreat. Again and again, governments and central banks have aggressively intervened in the economy to backstop runs on financial institutions, prevent the collapse of various asset markets, bolster purchasing power in the economy through direct payments to citizens, maintain the solvency of intensely pandemic-disadvantaged businesses, and stimulate employment (Tooze 2018). Perhaps even more remarkably, this revival of state and fiscal intervention has not simply been an emergency response to a series of crises. The accumulation of longer term economic, social, and environmental externalities, widely believed to be generated by policies privileging private-sector investment and market freedom, also has given rise to impatience with the use of market mechanisms to achieve social goals or redress imbalances. Political demands from society have already generated moves to use the state to redistribute income, forgive specific forms of debt, restructure industry, engineer “energy transitions,” encourage investment in “green tech” and otherwise redirect investment toward ends that appear to be, or are alleged to be, in line with the will of the demos (Allen 2022, Aronoff 2019).

Dramatic in itself, this re-politicization of investment and consumption comes at a time when our confidence in the institutions of liberal democracy is being challenged. The contemporary demos, wherever it is, often feels alienated, underserved, or excluded from the institutions that are there to represent and serve it. With the pursuit of social, economic, and environmental goals intentionally displaced to the market for half a century, the non-market, deliberative, political mechanisms for the democratic transmission of citizen will into investment and consumption policies have atrophied, or, worse, become instruments of economic and social interests favored by the market (Fishkin & Forbath 2022, Philippon 2019). Core institutions in the incumbent order (parliaments, parties, corporations, markets, unions, nonprofit entities) are being attacked, their authority and effectiveness as governors of economic process delegitimized and their claim to be channelers of democratic will called into question. Many once powerful movements and organizations that traditionally represented broad social interests in macroeconomic policy formation, such as those for workers and farmers, have nearly disappeared altogether (Andrias 2016). Other crucial governance institutions that continue to exist – in particular, central banks and corporations – are being continually recomposed by new social, economic, and environmental dynamics in ways that are dramatically recasting their boundaries and forcing a reconsideration of their social roles and the way in which they formulate and pursue investment goals (Omarova 2021; Herrigel 2018, Baldwin 2016,). Old norms, such as an understanding of economic growth as an unadulterated good capable of creating social harmony and overcoming material division and conflict, are losing their appeal in the face of worsening inequality and climate crises (Daly 2007, Kallis et al 2018). To be sure, there is no shortage of new ideas about alternative social ends – involving different ways of relating to nature, to work and production, or to community life and solidarity – but the existing political economic arrangements for converting those ideas into investment seem often inadequate to the task.

We believe that this confluence of mounting state intervention into key social processes of investment and consumption combined with growing disarray and disillusionment with the incumbent political and economic institutions and organizations of will formation and governance is the defining political economic dilemma of our age. Our proposal to the Neubauer Collegium is to convene a series of workshops that gather different groupings of scholars (from an array of disciplines) to discuss the relationship between the market, the state and democracy in both historical and contemporary contexts.

For many humanists and social scientists “the economy” has long been a realm apart, inscrutable to their analysis. In the wake of the global financial crisis of 2008 and the Great Recession that followed, new work, ranging across a number of disciplines in the humanities and social sciences, has sought to make the economy newly legible and alive to various forms of scholarly inquiry. Boundaries between economy and history, society, literature, politics, philosophy, law, psyche, environment, and more are being scrutinized. The ambition of this project was to set the groundwork at the University of Chicago for a cross-disciplinary, humanistic social science of economic life. Where, within different methodological and disciplinary approaches, can “the economy” be located? How and for what purposes can it be analyzed? How might various approaches inform one another? Faculty in History, Sociology, and English convened the group with the goal of creating dialogue between humanists and humanistic social scientists who use qualitative and interpretive methods, and social scientists who employ quantitative and mathematical methods.

The Gaming Orientation project (2016–2019) transformed the University of Chicago’s 2017 college orientation into an immersive, alternate-reality game (ARG) called The Parasite. Incoming students were invited to collaborate on nine challenges, each of which helped them get acclimated to campus and prepared for college life. As they banded together in search of clues to solve a central mystery—Where is the room that a secret society of masked monks seems to be guarding?—they became acquainted with each other and with key sites on and near campus. Innovative participatory-learning activities throughout the week prompted them to confront questions about their own identity, the identity of others, and presumptions about each. Whether they realized it or not—the game was not announced as a game, intentionally blurring the border between fiction and reality—the students were being primed for valuable lessons about collaboration, leadership, inclusivity, and digital media literacy. They were also helping the research team test the effectiveness of ARGs as tools for twenty-first-century education.

Preliminary research suggests that ARGs and related forms of transmedia storytelling and gameplay can be a useful platform for collaborative learning. Participants report that gameplay improves critical thinking and problem-solving skills and strengthens social bonds. Pervasive games that involve role-playing and a mix of challenges are increasingly common in areas as diverse as business, marketing, education, and personal leisure. But with one exception (an ARG focused on the technical skills that incoming students needed at the University of Southern California’s School of Cinematic Arts), large-scale gaming had not been attempted in a higher education environment prior to this project. Its impact has never before been rigorously studied. The Parasite was the first ARG that aimed to shape the culture of a specific university cohort. The Gaming Orientation project will assess whether it succeeded. With more than 600 players online, a robust Facebook following, and live play that included roughly half the incoming class of 1,750 students, it was arguably the largest educational transmedia game ever created.

Designing, preparing, running, and evaluating a production at this scale required collaboration. The project included an interdisciplinary team of scholars with expertise in sociology, new media studies, digital game theory and design, theater and performance, and visual art. The team developed and coordinated plans in close partnership with academic and administrative leaders on campus and solicited contributions from creative professionals and institutions around Chicago. Current students were partners at every stage, from conception to live performance. Kristen Schilt worked with a group of undergraduates to gather ethnographic data on the 2016 orientation, which helped the team plan for the 2017 event. An interdisciplinary “Big Problems” course, co-taught by Patrick Jagoda and Heidi Coleman in the 2016 Fall Quarter, introduced students to ARG theory and production while helping the research team tailor the game’s design for its intended audience.

The process of designing the ARG was regarded as practice-based research, an opportunity to develop, test, refine, and transform concepts about performance, digital media culture, and game-based education. Jagoda, Coleman, and other collaborators have already presented and published several scholarly articles exploring various aspects of The Parasite and broader implications for the future of “networked play.” The project has also received significant media attention, including a feature in Wired magazine that offered a nuanced portrait of The Parasite and quoted one first-year student who described it as “the coolest experience of my life.”

Research continues as the scholars focus on measuring the game’s effectiveness. Immediately after the game, they conducted a series of focus groups with approximately thirty first-year students, including those who did and did not participate. Those discussions are being translated into data and analyzed, and may inform the planning process for a proposed larger-scale ARG in 2019. The study’s key indicators of success include improvements in students’ co-curricular participation, mental and physical wellbeing, attitudes about diversity, feelings of integration into the University community, and degree attainment, particularly for under-represented minorities.

If the evidence shows positive results, this innovative approach to student orientation will further establish the University of Chicago as a leader in understanding and addressing issues of diversity and social difference within a community. The Parasite may serve as a model for introducing new forms of participation and networked play into higher education curricula.

During the last decade, the concept of the Anthropocene has been widely adopted throughout the social sciences and humanities to capture the role of societal processes in the transformation of the earth system and in the genesis of contemporary planetary environmental emergencies, including global heating, biodiversity loss, and ocean acidification, among others. While questions of periodization remain intensely contested in the Anthropocene literature, considerable emphasis has been placed on the “Great Acceleration,” a period of dramatically intensified energy and resource use after World War II that has also witnessed a massive escalation of global carbon emissions, pollution, deforestation, species extinctions, and other leading indicators of planetary environmental disorder.

Building upon the research team members’ previous and ongoing work in several interconnected fields of critical environmental studies related to these themes and extending it through a two-year collaborative initiative in intensive dialogue with other scholars working in parallel directions, this project seeks to develop an alternative analysis of the Great Acceleration as a conjuncture of geohistorical transformation and environmental crisis intensification. This entails, first, developing a systematic critique of the Great Acceleration narrative due to its problematic conceptualization and periodization of historical and contemporary socioenvironmental change. Second, our work will elaborate an alternative account of the historical genealogy, infrastructural anatomy, and metabolic underpinnings of today’s socioecological tipping points in the planetary biosphere.

Our investigations will explore what we will term the “hidden abodes” of the Great Acceleration—veiled yet essential historical-geographical dynamics associated with capitalism’s relentless appropriation of unpaid reproductive and regenerative work to support the profit-driven, productivity-oriented, and infrastructurally intensive dynamic of accumulation. These hidden abodes of appropriation are constitutive of capital’s constantly intensifying yet chronically unstable metabolism of labor, energy, food, and raw materials; they underpin each wave of productivity growth, embodied in the expansion of fixed capital outlays, during the geohistory of capitalism. Against this theoretical background, which is largely derived from co-applicant Jason W. Moore’s approach to capitalist world-ecology and the Capitalocene, our project aims to investigate the historically and geographically specific dynamics of appropriation and capitalization, closely associated with the generalization of a fossil-fuel based metabolic regime and large-scale, planet-encompassing infrastructural systems, during the post-1870s period up through the present. We hypothesize that the latter laid the foundations for the consequent Great Acceleration of the so-called “Golden Age” of postwar capitalist expansion, and thus have also figured crucially in the climate and nature emergencies of our time.

Through discussions and investigations among the core team members, a series of internal seminars and workshops with several scholars who are developing closely allied research agendas, and a concluding public symposium, this project will illuminate the dramatic global socioenvironmental transformations of the last half-century in a longue durée geohistorical context. We also aim to develop a useful theoretical and historical perspective from which to decipher the cascading climate and nature emergencies of the early twenty-first century and the prospects for counteracting them in ways that support social and environmental justice, and the flourishing of both human and non-human life.

This research project will explore the material, ideational, and domestic political changes that enabled the United States to enter into global politics — first as an imperial force, and later as an architect of a liberal international order. Ruth Bloch Rubin’s research will focus on the advocacy infrastructure undergirding America’s hidden empire, exploring congressional efforts to govern the nation’s conquered territories and peoples in the electorate’s blind spot. Austin Carson’s research will focus on the material and knowledge infrastructure of America’s global turn, assessing how leaders developed the geographic knowledge and physical infrastructure necessary for global power projection. By excavating these “infrastructures” of American hegemony, we hope to (1) contribute to the growing literature by scholars of history, political science, sociology, and law on the rise of American imperialism; and (2) inspire new collaborations between scholars of international relations, American politics, history, and other disciplines.