The 2024/2025 seminar theme will be Home. Read more here.

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 2022/2023 Committee on Globalization and Social Change seminar theme is Climates.

Most immediately, our interest is environmental. We will think together about climate change and associated conceptions of nature, earth, planet, biosphere, extraction, and Anthropocene whether in relation to the current global conjuncture or other historical epochs. We are interested in work that approaches climate change and climate politics from a range of perspectives (e.g., political economic, geopolitical, anti-imperial, aesthetic, science and technology studies etc.) This may also mean using the natural climate or climate change to illuminate phenomena that appear to exist outside or apart from nature.

On another level, we are interested in work that may use “climate” as an optic or framework for social, cultural, or political analysis. On the one hand, climates are concrete, material, and situated in specific places and sets of conditions. On the other hand, they are dynamic and mobile. They do not respect territorial, administrative or cultural boundaries. A climate is structured and amorphous, an object and a medium, ubiquitous but invisible –something real that is realized through its effects on other real objects, processes, and relations. There exist both micro-climates and general climactic systems.

Third, we are interested in work that focuses on climate as something like a socio-cultural atmosphere, current, attitude, affect, style, spirit, discourse, set of norms etc. This is the colloquial sense in which people speak, for example, about economic, political, social, cultural, or aesthetic climates. Likewise, we may think about, for example, climates of fear, violence, impunity, paranoia, loss, despair, enmity, uncertainty, anticipation, longing, hope, possibility etc. Such “climates” may be pervasive or concentrated, dominant or dissident. They may be understood to be direct, explicit, identifiable forces and/or a set of implicit background conditions or media that enable, refract, condition, or channel other more explicit objects and forces.

Finally, we are interested in work that may link natural/environmental climates to climate as analytic optic and/or a socio-cultural atmosphere (e.g., the link between climate change and a particular social, political, or cultural climate).

Our annual theme for 2021-2022 will be “Borders” understood broadly as relating to spatial, temporal, ontological, epistemological, and existential domains.

Our world-historical conjuncture is characterized by planetary processes that simultaneously disregard and establish borders such as finance capitalism, labor migrations, neoliberal imperialisms, war and displacement, global pandemics, and climate change. It is also characterized by a resurgence of bordering practices that seek to anticipate, contest, or disavow such planetary processes. Such bordering practices are related to the reactionary power of security states, national economies, capitalist private property, xenophobic nationalism, official and popular racisms, authoritarian populism, neo-fascism, anti-democratic cultural or religious fundamentalisms, military occupations, and border walls. They are also related to the resistance struggles and emancipatory hopes related to popular democracy or democratic socialism in one country, autonomous political communities, experiments in occupation and assembly, indigenous sovereignty, refusals of extraction, gentrification, assimilation, anti-racist and minoritarian identity politics.

Geopolitical borders delimit, demarcate, and circumscribe territory, state sovereignty, legal jurisdiction, and political communities in ways that are concrete and abstract, material and symbolic, real and imagined. Borders do not only mark geographic or political boundaries or limits. They are dynamic elements of systems and practices of regulation, domination, subjectivation. Borders constitute subjects: citizens, nationals, autochtones/indigènes, migrants, refugees, exiles, the undocumented, stateless people, objects of humanitarian intervention, enemies, comrades etc. Borders often exist within social formations. They simultaneously exclude categories of people and include them as excluded. Borders do not only separate, they also connect; they produce borderlands marked by ongoing processes of entanglement, interdependence, mixture. Borderlands are variously characterized by conflict, violence, hierarchy, inequality but also reciprocity, mutuality, creative transformations. The question of borders might be usefully thought in relation to the adjacent issue of (voluntary and involuntary) human mobilities. The geopolitics of borders opens onto questions of place, home, homeland, and lifeworlds on the one hand, and the world, the planet, and the planetary on the other.

We welcome proposals from mid-career CUNY faculty members working on any aspect of these issues as well as any of the other ways we might treat borders as concept, object, or orientation. These might include, but are not limited to:

• Political economy of borders

  • enclosure, rent, extraction, land grabs, special economic zones, property regimes, labor markets, tariff zones, norms and standards

• Ontological, epistemological, and existential borders

  • categorical, identitarian, and binary thinking as a border/ing practice (regarding race, ethnicity, nationality, religion, secularity, gender and sexuality, human and non-human animals, humans and nature, life and non-life) to be considered in connection to relational thinking that questions, displaces, interrupts such border/ing practices (whether queer, deconstructive, dialectical).

  • borders that constitute and separate scholarly disciplines or forms of knowledge (scientific, philosophical, aesthetic/poetic, affective, embodied).

  • limit experiences (i.e., violence, trauma, precarity, displacement, transcendence, collective effervescence) that may differentiate the normal or mundane from the exceptional, however construed

• Temporal borders

  • explicit and implicit processes that periodize, posit borders between supposedly disparate historical epochs, and make categorical distinctions between past, present, and future

• Aesthetic borders

In 2020–2021, the Committee on Globalization and Social Change’s annual theme will be “Debt.” Most immediately, we are interested in debt as an economic instrument and relation. Whether in its consumer, student, or national forms, debt is an integral feature of contemporary financialization and neoliberal hegemony. Debt serves as both source of and fix for potential economic crises. By mortgaging futures, debt produces subjects and regulates practices. It may reinforce social inequalities, uneven geographic development, and divisions of labor on local, regional, and global scales. Debt mediates and is mediated by gender and racial divisions. It may obstruct or nourish collective movements and imaginaries.

But, we are equally interested in the many additional domains that may be usefully engaged or reconsidered through a reworked concept of debt. For example:

• The central role played by debt as a condition of possibility of capitalist accumulation (on multiple scales). Debt as mediating social inequality in capitalist societies and the capitalist world-system.

• Debt, empire, and racial capitalism. Debt as an instrument of uneven development and imperial expropriation. Debt as entangled in long-term histories of imperial subordination and governance. Debt as a nodal point where racial capitalism and Western imperialism intersect and fuel one another.

• Debt (and credit ratings) as vehicles for postcolonial dispossession and alienation whereby decisions about the global economy which immediately affect life-chances of non-Western societies are conceded to non-democratic supranational organizations (e.g., the IMF, World Bank, or World Economic Forum, etc.)

• Debt as a possible lever for collective struggles, as in debt collectives, debt strikes, and debt jubilees. Debt as a site for postcolonial refusal and a ground of South-South solidarity.

•  Non-Western and non-capitalist forms of debt, along with corresponding social relations and temporal horizons.  

• Debt as a way to engage with harm, responsibility, and justice. Relations of legal, moral, and financial indebtedness may be produced by:  1. systems of exploitation, expropriation, and brutalization; 2. punctual events linked to war, riots, massacres, pogroms, deportations etc.;  3. Movements for economic reparations, reparative justice, post-conflict or post-revolutionary reconciliation may all be thought through the framework of debt.

• Debt as an optic for thinking about humans as ethical and political subjects, or humanity itself as an ethical and political subject. Implied debt as subtending the politics of human rights and citizenship.

• Debt as a way to engage the creation or obstruction of relations of social interdependence, ethical reciprocity, collective responsibility, and political solidarity (within and across groups).

• Debt as a way to engage processes of cultural or aesthetic creolization, appropriation, stigmatization, as well as various anxieties of influence.

• Debt as a way to engage questions related to individual psychic and collective social legacies, traditions, inheritances, whether as endowments or pathologies, gifts or burdens.

• Debt as a way to engage the politics of time, intergenerational responsibility, temporal schemas that relate past, present, and future in historically specific ways.

• Debt as a way of reconsidering how future-oriented imaginaries are fueled or foreclosed.

• Debt as site for the production of (normalizing, ideological, Eurocentric) knowledge about the allegedly universal character of economies, markets, and behavior. 

We inhabit a moment when the very concept of future is in question. On the one hand, catastrophic discourses fueled by converging global crises envision apocalyptic ends. On the other hand, these same conditions inspire utopian and emancipatory discourses which have insisted throughout the history of aesthetic and political modernism, as they continue to insist today, that another world is possible and envision revolutionary change.

Most generally we would like to explore “future(s)” as a theoretical concept and analytic category that may help or obstruct attempts to grasp the contemporary political situation. Can we continue to use “future” in the conventional sense or should the very concept (along with its temporal and political implications) be rethought in relation to our historical conjuncture? How does an engagement with “futures past” help us to understand these struggles in the present? In the seminar we will likely engage with: the history of the concept “future”; current discourses about the future, possible futures, futurity etc.; contemporary practices, processes, and events that are already producing a new or “future” set of arrangements (with implications for understandings and conceptions of temporality); and the history of the concept “future” and historical materials that show how alternative understandings or experiences of “future” may have obtained in other times and places.

The seminar is made up of participants whose work includes, but is not limited to, topics such as:

• theories or philosophies of the future (and corresponding notions of historical temporality);

• economic futures and the future of capitalism (e.g., debt, credit, financialization, work, runaway growth, economic crisis etc.);

• environmental futures (e.g., climate change, resource extraction, debates about the Anthropocene etc.);

• political futures (e.g. the changing relation between state, economy, and society; eclipse of democracy, populism and authoritarianism; mass displacement and statelessness; globality and borders; (im)mobilities, permanent war; new forms of imperialism and internationalism; prospects for socialism etc.);

• religious futures (e.g., the worldwide explosion of evangelical Christianity, resurgent and novel forms of messianic and apocalyptic thinking);

• aesthetic and cultural futures and futurisms (e.g., Afro-futurism, sci-fi, indigenous futures); dystopias; visionary literary, musical, and visual practices; new forms of social media and mass mediation);

• subjective futures (e.g., emergent forms of subjectivity, embodiment, intimacy, desire etc.; the widespread fear that there is “no future”);

• techno-futures (especially related to automation, digitization, and biomedicine)

This year’s seminar explores questions relating to the category, broadly and creatively defined, of “translation.”

• direct engagement with the epistemologies, ethics, and politics of translating from one text, language, or culture to another, as well as from oral to written discourses;

• translation across any number of real or fictive spaces (e.g., public/private, dominant/subaltern, normative/transgressive), spheres (economic, social, legal, cultural, aesthetic), or media (print, visual, digital) within a social formation as well as across different social media platforms and genres; translation back and forth between academic and general public domains;

• the ‘trans’ aspect of translation – the movement, crossing, or transgression that may be bound up with transsexual, transgender, translocal, transnational, and translational processes, practices, subjectivities, situations, objects;

• translation as a relational practice and process that has social, ethical, and political dimensions and the situations of proximity and encounter that characterize translation;

• how translation may entail relations of subordination and domination or reciprocity and dialogue, discord or concord, misrecognition or understanding, colonial hierarchies or solidarity projects; ways that translation may reinforce divisions, allow for non self-evident connections, or actually produce new subjectivities, identities, imaginations, formations;

• translation across different historical epochs, historical epistemologies, temporal frameworks; translation as a temporal category;

• debates within translation studies or raised by translation processes and practices about transparency and incommensurability, universality and singularity, containment and opening, the dangers of reduction and opportunities for dissemination and ramification;

• attempts to think beyond dyadic and unidirectional models of translation by attending to complex fields of translation in which multiple, multi-directional, and multivalent translation practices unfold simultaneously;

• translation as the norm (for thinking, knowing, communicating, relating), within languages as well as across them, rather than the exception;

• and finally, translation as an epistemological, ethical, aesthetic, and/or political concept, phenomenon, or object.

With the U.S. presidential election of 2016, public debate about “populism” has intensified. Trumpism as a populist phenomenon is certainly linked to systemic shifts in the United States and the specific relations of forces there today. But it should also be understood in relation to a worldwide rise of anti-democratic forms of authoritarian and plutocratic rule whose power has strong populist, nationalist, and xenophobic roots.

These developments raise innumerable questions regarding the changing structural relation between state, society, and economy; shifting configurations of nation, class, and race; the future of parliamentary politics; the power of social media; the relation between “truth” and power; the status of “ideology” and the place of symbolism, affect, and (collective) psyches in contemporary politics; “elitism” and the politics of ressentiment; the relation between imperialism, nationalism, and populism; the relation between populism, fascism, and white supremacy or liberal democracy; the relation between “the people” and “the popular”; the difference between right-wing and left-wing populisms and identity politics; the development of authoritarian populism and the prospects of anti-racist and anti-capitalist resistance, popular insurgency, or democratic socialism.

We propose to spend 2017-2018 thinking together about the global history, character, and future significance of populism. We invite applications from scholars whose work engages this issue from any time period, scholarly field, geographic areas, and theoretical perspective.

From the Haitian Revolution in the 18th century to the Cold War and the present day, refugees from Latin American and Caribbean countries to the US and to neighboring countries, as well as those who are internally displaced through violence, have participated in making and remaking boundaries, as well as notions of identity, freedom, and citizenship in the Americas. Since World War I, successive crises of what Hannah Arendt called stateless peoples, ranging from the partition of India to that of Palestine have presented significant humanitarian, political, and theoretical challenges.  Arguably, however, the current refugee crisis affecting Syria, Somalia, Chad, and Yemen, among other places, is the most severe since World War II and has presented a profound challenge to the unity and stability of the European Union.  The need to find refuge under conditions of economic need, political persecution and violence is a fundamental dimension of globalization. The objective of this year’s seminar is to describe, debate and theorize refuge and the complex status of those forced to seek it outside their homes. In addition to readings directly addressing the contemporary conditions of refugees the following corollary issues will be considered:

• Post-nationality or in Étienne Balibar’s terms, transnational citizenship. How does the widespread plight of refugees call for new theories and practices of political belonging? Should the nation-state be the primary form of refuge?

• Displacement. What are the material and affective challenges, and perhaps opportunities, of mass displacements? And how is refuge constructed, even in transit?

• Temporality. Refugees often experience a different relation to home from that of emigrants in terms of their desire for return. How do refugees experience a future, and a past in ways that are distinct from the subject of diaspora or of migration?

• Heritage. As we have witnessed in the Taliban’s desecration of Buddhist sculptures and the destruction and sale of ancient artifacts by ISIS, conflict can lead to the irreparable loss of cultural patrimony. How does this symbolic violence relate to that suffered by refugees? And can museums, as places of refuge for objects, serve also as political or historical models?

Throughout the modern period, the development of capitalism, imperialism, and liberalism have been inseparable from novel forms of and ideas about “freedom.” Socially embedded forms of differentiation and exclusion (related to constructions race, gender, sexuality, religion, civilization etc.) have also been authorized by ideologies of freedom. Diverse theoretical traditions have developed sophisticated analyses of the entwined relationship between (forms of modern) freedom and (varieties of modern) domination. It is also the case that throughout the modern period innumerable social, political, intellectual, religious, and cultural movements seeking to overcome forms of modern domination have explicitly done so in the name of, and with the aim of, “freedom.”

Given this history, what kind of relationship might intellectuals and political actors today develop to the concept of freedom and its heterogeneous legacies? Is some notion of freedom necessary for critique, or is it on the other hand an obstacle to clear thinking about social justice? Is freedom best regarded as a dangerous ideology and a disabling fiction? A utopian desire or a regulative ideal? A concrete condition and/or a real possibility? Do the stakes change when we think of freedom as an idea as compared to a demand, a practice, a social status, or a form of lived experience? Should freedom be thought differently in relation to different political scales (e.g., local self-management, state forms, the global order)? Do different notions of freedom contain different temporal assumptions and/or different affective registers?

Some questions we explored include the following:

• In what way might we usefully distinguish freedom from, or re-articulate it with, related concepts of liberty, autonomy, and emancipation?

• How might a critical understanding of freedom help us to distinguish among varieties of unfreedom, domination, and alienation?

• How should we think about fugitivity, marronage and related practices and spaces of relative freedom with regimes of unfreedom?

• How might we consider freedom in relation to tensions between rights and responsibilities in struggles for empowerment and voice of minority groups?

• How might it be useful to think freedom in relation to terms such as equality, justice, solidarity, mutuality, reciprocity, accountability, responsibility, and/or revolution?

• Is there a tension between freedom and ethics, or are they indispensable to one another?

• How can we understand freedom in historically specific ways, in relation to particular historical moments or social formations? Or is it by definition a universal category?

• How might we engage different cultural traditions for understanding freedom and unfreedom? Or is freedom an inherently Western concept?

• How has the concept or experience of freedom circulated? Has it assumed different forms or meanings in different locations? Has it been a unifying or a divisive force translocally?

• Do contemporary structural transformations associated with globalization make freedom more or less useful as a concept and political reference point?

• In what ways might freedom need to be re-conceptualized for these times?

• Could a seemingly outmoded notion of freedom be re-functioned to address contemporary challenges?

• What are the political and analytic risks of holding onto a notion of freedom—or alternatively of abandoning it?

• Does freedom continue to underwrite current forms of domination, or continue to be useful as a standpoint from which to challenge them?

As in our previous years focused on “solidarity” and “temporality,” we will organize our seminar and public programming around this key concept that has variously enabled, shaped, and foreclosed a variety of social, political, ethical, cultural, and aesthetic traditions, processes, practices, and formations on various scales (with emancipatory and heteronomous valences).

The CGSC is a transdisciplinary group whose collective work is not driven by any specific theory or ideology. We begin with the observation that existing categories and analytic frameworks are inadequate to grasp the dynamics of our historical present. We are thus interested not only in questioning conventional assumptions in light of contemporary developments but also in the possibility of reclaiming, reworking, and refunctioning seemingly outmoded concepts in and for these times. Given our interest in reflecting on the relationship between inherited concepts, critical theory, the contemporary situation, and political futures, we believe it will be fruitful to think together about the question of “humanity” today, beyond the familiar debates between abstract universal humanism and concrete cultural particularism.

Scholars have long examined how a certain conception of both the human and humanity as a whole authorized modern scientific rationality, natural law, Enlightenment universality, liberal democracy and secularism as well as corresponding forms of imperial expansion, Atlantic slavery, and colonial racism. Many of these assumptions continue to inform contemporary practices of humanitarianism, human rights advocacy, and international law. Throughout the modern period critical conceptions of humanity have also subtended emancipatory currents of socialism, mutualism, anarchism, feminism, internationalism, and cosmopolitanism. This legacy may be recognized in differently coordinated international solidarity movements for insurgencies across the Global South, Occupy movements against capitalist globalization and neoliberal privatization and in defense of community commons, for a global public sphere or in the name of global democracy and justice. Far reaching questions about the human and humanity continue to fuel other arenas of debate across the disciplines concerning, for example: alternative modernities, non-Eurocentric epistemologies, world literature and translation, global universities, contemporary art, biopower and biopolitics, big science, genomics, and the so-called neuroscience revolution, trauma theory, environmental crisis and the anthropocene, and conventional divisions between humans and non-human animals.