Thinking about Thinking

CERCLs “Thinking about Thinking” initiative is meant to highlight shared concerns across the divisions of the university and demonstrate the various ways they are understood and explored based on disciplinary tools. The goal is to further encourage and enable thinking across divisions, and thereby enhance our interdisciplinary potential for wrestling with key concerns. This initiative is the work of the CERCL Fellow. The CERCL Fellow is embedded in a department at Rice University, with the expectation to teach, conduct research and help to design and implement across campus new, interdisciplinary initiatives that advance the arts and culture, and reflects CERCL's social justice and equity aims.

Chelsea Spencer | CERCL Postdoctoral Fellow in Architecture

Thinking About Seeing

A SERIES OF TALKS ABOUT (INTER)DISCIPLINARY VISION. What does research look like—literally—in different disciplines? This series of lunchtime talks brings together researchers from across Rice and beyond to discuss their work in visual terms. The series is part of CERCL’S “Thinking about Thinking” initiative to highlight shared concerns across disciplines, as well as interdisciplinary potential for reckoning with them.

REGISTER TO ATTEND | Lunch will be served

Friday, April 11, 12–1pm

Melia Bonomo | Physics of Living Systems, Department of Physics & Astronomy
Brett Schneider | Structural Engineer, Rice Architecture

Friday, April 18, 12–1pm

Illya Hicks | Operations Research, Department of Computational Applied Mathematics and Operations Research
Stan Kannegieter | Economics, Baker Center for Energy Studies

Friday, April 25, 12–1pm

Portia Hopkins | Rice University Historian
Hannah Kemal-Hyden | Art of the Islamic Worlds, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston

moderated by
Chelsea Spencer, CERCL Postdoctoral Fellow in Architecture

Devin T. Mays | CERCL Fellow in the Humanities and the Arts in the Department of Visual and Dramatic Arts (VADA)

Thinking About Thinking: Impermanence

A CALL-TO-ATTENTION, A PRESENCE OF AWARENESS. This proposal, a constant, in perpetuity, addresses the capacity to conceive understanding. It’s a process unencumbered by results. These are ontological concerns. When dealing with the delicate conditions of possibility, the terms of scale and boundary become obscured at best. They become unsettled, even restless. The aboutness of thinking is endless, meaning, it is spirited. In the spirit of this endless meaningfulness, I look to and listen for the presence of sound. Its generous impermanence offers unconditional space of eternal returns. Without the command of a beginning or demand of an end, an impermanent presence sound prevails.

A series of screenings, events, performances and conversations were part of Thinking About Thinking: Impermanence.

  • The Day I Met the Sun, performed at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago and the Moody Center for the Arts

  • A Rice Cinema screening and discussion of Don Cherry and Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take One

  • They, Who Sound performed with Nameless Sound at the Lawndale Art Center

  • Thinking About Thinking: Sound & Situation, an exploration of the theme of sound and situation alongside collaborators Dodom Kim, Postdoctoral Fellow, Dept of Anthropology; Nancy Yao, Graduate Student, Dept of Religion; Devin Gonzalez, Junior, Dept of Electrical & Computer Engineering; Saba Feleke, Senior, Dept of Mechanical Engineering & Dept of Art.