Every spring, research fellows at the Tanner Humanities Center give work-in-progress talks in a casual setting and receive feedback from colleagues across campus. “Our community of fellows is at the heart of the Tanner Humanities Center, and our weekly works in progress talks are at the heart of the fellows’ community,” says Scott Black, Director of the Center. “The WIP workshops and presentations are also the best part of the Tanner fellowships for many of our fellows, and discussing their work is one of my favorite parts of my job too.” 

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Jake Nelson, Associate Professor of Communication:
“The Polarization of American Jews: The Fracturing of a Community through the Eyes of Its Journalists”

(January 23) The war in Gaza which began on October 7, 2023, has not only thrown the Israel–Palestine conflict into sharper relief; it has also further fractured the consensus among American Jews about their community’s relationship to the Israeli state. In his presentation, Nelson shared his research into Jewish American polarization about Israel as demonstrated in Jewish American news media. From interviews with several journalists and editors from Jewish news organizations, Nelson discerns a significant shift in these audiences’ engagement with news. 

Instead of focusing on content preferences and explicit political stances, these journalists are now also compelled to consider their audiences’ emotional states. Journalists respond to audiences who are “grieving,” “shaking,” “scared,” and “angry.” To the more familiar binary of Zionism and anti-Zionism is added a mutual feeling of exclusion:  Journalists perceive Zionist Jews feeling ostracized from progressive circles, while anti-Zionist Jews feel alienated from Jewish institutions. In this context, people turn to journalists for more than information or analysis; they seek emotional validation. 

In the Q&A session, participants discussed the possible limits of polarization and Zionism/anti-Zionism as paradigms which capture the intensely affective tensions around Israel–Palestine, as well as the longer history of Jewish assimilation in American society. Nelson’s work speaks to the larger phenomenon of mass synchronization of emotion, not just information or opinion, in news cycles which move faster among more segmented audiences. 

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Brandon Render, Assistant Professor of History:
“Colorblind University: A History of Racial Ideologies in Higher Education”

(January 29) The Civil Rights and Black Power movements were not only social phenomena, according to Render, but also intellectual projects that fundamentally shifted how Americans understand race and racial colorblindness, particularly in higher education. In examining archival materials, Render traces how colorblindness has evolved over time in college admissions, department structures, and curriculum design. His research spans from Carter G. Woodson’s 1933 critique of education’s erasure of Black experience through early desegregation cases in the 1930s–40s, to the development of affirmative action policies in later decades, and culminates with an analysis of how colorblindness transformed from supporting affirmative action to dismantling it. 

Render provides detailed case studies including the University of Texas’s 1970s affirmative action policies, Harvard’s establishment of a Black Studies department in 1969, and Stanford’s Western Culture Program debate in the 1980s. He demonstrates that colorblindness and affirmative action weren’t always antagonistic forces—in the 1970s, some universities used colorblind interpretations to support affirmative action policies. 

Questions from the audience touched on the effects of Lyndon Johnson’s administration and the Moynihan Report on higher education, as well as the role of quotas in early affirmative action debates. Render’s project uncovers the varied forms of the supposedly simple idea of colorblindness:  thought experiment, ethical axiom, legal doctrine, administrative procedure, and object of ideological critique. As Render shows, these transformations are both conceptual and practical, revealing themselves as much in documents like department meeting minutes and budget appropriations, as in political platforms.

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Jessie Chaplain, PhD candidate, Department of Communication:
“(Re)Imagining Climate Justice Trajectories: Transnational Coalitions and Worldmaking in the UNFCCC” 

(February 12) How do climate change activists represent their constituencies and exert influence at high-level summits like Conference of the Parties of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC)? Using the methods of participatory critical rhetoric, Jessie Chaplain presented her analysis of activist strategies at recent annual COPs. 

At issue in these climate negotiations is the concept of the “just transition” to renewable energy sources. Chaplain’s fieldwork reveals how developed nations like the US or UK frame the concept narrowly, with the effect of preserving their advantages over developing nations. Against this dominant view, climate justice activists from the Global South seek to shift from “economies of harm” to “economies of care,” through redistribution and reparations for climate damage caused by the Global North. Their advocacy and influence are constituted by “people power,” which Chaplain presents as a model of activism based on coalition-building, decolonization of exploitative and extractive institutions and power-structures, and attending to ancestral or cultural claims to self-determination. 

In the discussion, Chaplain explained how her project critiques the nation-state framework of the COP, and acknowledges the privileges embedded in COP spaces. Audience members inquired about indigenous perspectives, the role of the nation-state in climate negotiations, the concept of scaling up local solutions, and tensions within youth activism. Chaplain’s work speaks to the embedded, always-already personal nature of both rhetorical inquiry and public advocacy. 

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Christopher Miller, Assistant Professor, Honors College:
“Public Enemies: Sounding the Limits of Democracy in the American Lyric”

(February 20) Vagrancy is an ambivalent topos of American culture:  it can represent abjection and deprivation, as in the case of homelessness, or open-ended individual freedom, as in the counter-culture of the Beats. Beginning with the constructions of vagrancy as a crime in English law since the late medieval period, Miller explores how later American adaptations of these laws have historically regulated who has a right to public space, and on what basis. In this context, Miller traces the relationship between lyric poetic speech that implies a vagrant speaker, on one hand, and democratic culture, on the other. His project spans from the mid-19th century with Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself” through the 20th century, analyzing how poets and musicians have embodied vagrant personas to explore questions of personhood and belonging. 

The lyric is traditionally associated with developing personhood, where an “I” speaks to a “you” and thereby attains recognition as a democratic equal. Miller examines how major cultural figures—including Walt Whitman, Hart Crane, blues musicians like Bessie Smith, and Gwendolyn Brooks—have adopted transient lyric positions to contest American values around mobility and freedom. In particular, Black musicians have voiced experiences of displacement and movement that differ from romanticized versions of transience. For example, Bessie Smith's “Backwater Blues” expresses the desperate and compulsory nature of transience for Black Americans following events like the 1927 Mississippi flood, contrasting with voluntary wandering celebrated by white poets. 

Discussion in the Q&A touched on the role of obscenity law in many of the works in Miller’s study, as well as differences between urban and rural modes of vagrancy. Miller’s examination of the lyric’s relation to democratic culture attests to the enduring relevance of interpersonal recognition to American democratic norms, for which impersonal or procedural modes of governance are often revealed to be insufficient. 

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Lindsey Webb, PhD Candidate, Department of English:
“Orange Greens”

(February 27) The Kennecott Mine outside Salt Lake City is so massive it can be seen from space, yet one can fail to recognize it even when looking directly at it. This paradox of visibility without legibility forms the core of Webb’s essay collection exploring land art, extraction, and visual perception in the American West. In her presentation, Webb shared selections from three essays that investigate how we see—or fail to see—the landscapes we inhabit and transform.

Webb’s project examines the perceptual disorientation created by extraction sites like the Kennecott Mine, which defy human scale and comprehension while nevertheless evincing humanity’s domination of the land. She also considers artistic responses to extraction, including Robert Smithson’s unrealized proposal to create an artwork in the mine’s pit that would force viewers to confront its pollution rather than look away. Webb’s essays move across varied terrain:  from Mormon seer stones and early mining technologies, to the Bureau of Land Management’s Visual Resource Management system, which attempts to balance resource extraction with scenic preservation through formal aesthetic categories like shape and repetition. Her collection interweaves memoir, art criticism, and historical research, including reflections on her own great-grandfather’s history as a miner in Utah. 

During the Q&A, participants engaged with Webb’s methodology, discussing the tension between her associative, fragmentary approach and the political dimensions of extraction. Her project challenges any attempt at easy reconciliation of aesthetics with ethical or moral judgement: Our immediate perception of the dramatic landscape of the American West often combines intensity and inaccuracy in one. 

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[The Tanner Humanities Center neither supports nor opposes the views expressed in its events.]