Jeffrey Rubin’s Seeing and Not Seeing Project | Latin American Studies

Jeffrey Rubin’s Seeing and Not Seeing Project

A new piece on the Critical Conversations section of the Center for Humanities (BUCH) website by Christine D’Auria spotlights Jeffrey Rubin’s Seeing and Not Seeing (SANS) Faculty Seminar. The initiative is sponsored in part by the Center for Latin American Studies.

From the article:

The SANS project seeks to develop a sensibility: a way of perceiving, describing, and analyzing social and political forces that cuts against an analysis of them as discrete phenomena. Rubin and his SANS colleagues from a range of fields and disciplines have developed this sensibility over the course of the five years of a faculty seminar and public lecture series sponsored by the BU Center for the Humanities.

The SANS sensibility, as Rubin describes it, wants “to see the thing that’s in front of our eyes” and how it both “exercises power” and is part of a broad network of interactions (i.e., of what we characterize as institutions, religions, races, armies, economies, regions, or genders). To do this, SANS holds multiple ways of seeing simultaneously, discerning new patterns by delaying the move to argument and conclusion characteristic of much academic analysis. This approach also slows down deliberations and acknowledges uncertainty as we seek to act ethically in situations of harm.

Read the rest of the piece on the BUCH website.

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