The Committee on Globalization and Social Change annual theme for 2023-2024 will be Speculation.
Our era is characterized by growing uncertainty, ambivalence, anxiety, dread, or anguish about the future. This agonistic relation to what may come is bound up with various types of speculation. We might characterize these as attempts to see (and act in relation to) possibilities that cannot be reliably discerned.
Speculation is a multivalent term that signals all manner of conjecture, whether poetic, philosophical, technocratic, and economic. Poetic speculation is about imagination and fabulation. It conjures alternative realities and fantastic worlds that may be true. Philosophical speculation offers provisional hypotheses and assays provisional conclusions about issues that cannot be empirically verified. It attempts to know what cannot be definitively known. Technocratic and financial speculation are about managing risk by correctly guessing possible outcomes. The former seeks to master uncertainty through prediction, planning, and preparation. The latter seeks to profit from uncertainty by assuming risk and gambling on outcomes. Speculation may insist upon or disavow uncertainty, unknowability, openness, and risk. It may call into question or reaffirm conventional notions of truth. By attempting to see possibilities, speculative conjecture may also create possibilities. The speculative gaze or operation may also be directed at the unknowable past. It may entail conjectures on what might have been. Speculation, in whatever register, may refer to a practice, a disposition, or an orientation. It may point in utopian or dystopian directions. It may be grounded in hopeful idealism, pessimistic realism, or calculative cynicism. It indexes subjective modes of seeing, knowing, naming, anticipating, conjuring, remembering, or creating. Speculation thus has epistemological, socio-political, and temporal ramifications.
The Committee welcomes dissertation fellowship applications from Graduate Center students whose research engages or illuminates some aspect of speculation, whatever the historical period or geographical region. The deadline for student fellow applications is Tuesday, January 17, 2023, no later than 5pm, using the Graduate Center's dissertation fellowship application.
