Dear CICI community,
Welcome to the Spring semester, we hope you’ve had a restorative break. In these turbulent times, I take comfort in the knowledge that we have the analytic and imaginative resources across campus and at CICI to help us navigate the flood of news and to stay focused on our aims and aspirations.
As this preview of our Spring offerings suggests, CICI remains committed to reflecting on some of the most urgent questions of our moment: the role of religion in democracy; police violence against racialized bodies; borders and the right to move; ecological crisis. In addition to diagnosis and critique, however, our programs also explore affirmative visions of the past, present, and future to offer inspiration, whether it is by recovering the potentialities of prior cohabitation under duress, addressing Freud’s legacies today, witnessing the creativity of migrants in a bordered world, or exploring forms of re-enchantment opened by mysticism, psychedelics, and theory.
We are excited to announce that CICI and the International Consortium of Critical Theory Programs have been awarded $2.6 million by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to support a groundbreaking multi-year initiative titled “A Counter-Imaginary in Authoritarian Times.” Through collaborative workshops, conferences, performances, publications, and a dynamic, open-ended digital platform, this project brings together academics, artists, activists, and other community members to develop concrete strategies, tools, and proposals to create a counter-imaginary to authoritarianism. The project will be undertaken in collaboration with Environmental Arts & Humanities Initiative (EAHI), and New York University’s Critical Racial Anti-Colonial Study Co-Lab (CRACS Co-Lab). The project is led by Judith Butler, Distinguished Professor in the Graduate School; Shannon Jackson, Cyrus and Michelle Hadidi Professor; Debarati Sanyal, Zaffaroni Family Chair; and Denise Ferreira da Silva, Samuel Rudin Professor in the Humanities, New York University. Read the full press release here.
On April 25-26 CICI will host a two-day international conference titled “Bordered Life and the Right to Move,” a gathering of artists, scholars and activists discussing borders, race and migration today.
This preview of Spring programming shows a selection of events, so meanwhile please check our website for additional announcements. The Environmental Arts and Humanities Initiative’supdated web page also contains a link to open seminars on Ecology Across the Arts and Humanities taking place this month.
Debarati Sanyal, Director
Center for Interdisciplinary Critical Inquiry (CICI)
