EIHS Workshop: Categorical Imperatives: The Stakes of Scholarly Units of Analysis

How do scholars determine the appropriate units of analysis for studying the past? What is at stake in the choice of a city, a province, a nation, a region, an empire, or even the world? This panel explores what is gained or lost when grouping people into naturalized territorial categories, as well as the agency of historical actors in rejecting or reconstituting these categories. Panelists will reflect on tensions between the boundedness of pre-given units of analysis and the freedom of historical actors to deploy, contest, or radically re-imagine the dominant ordering of their worlds from a diverse set of geographic and temporal perspectives: museums in late imperial Russia, gender and power in the Yuan court, interwar population exchanges in the Balkans, and multiculturalism and policing in 1980s Los Angeles.

Featuring:
Albert Cavallaro, Graduate Student, History, University of Michigan 
Andrea Valedón-Trapote, Graduate Student, History, University of Michigan 
David Helps, Graduate Student, History, University of Michigan 
Lediona Shahollari, Graduate Student, History, University of Michigan 
Michael Witgen (chair), Professor, American Culture & History, University of Michigan

Free and open to the public. This is a remote event and will take place online via Zoom. Please register here in advance: https://umich.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_0GQ6_D41Tp-OF6h451pYIw

This event is part of the Friday Series of the Eisenberg Institute for Historical Studies. It is made possible by a generous contribution from Kenneth and Frances Aftel Eisenberg.