This talk looks at the question of comparative ethnic studies through the critique and the rearticulation of comparative projects. It goes on to ask the question of how one might institutionalize and let one’s institutional practice and project be shaped by the critique of institutionalization.

Roderick A. Ferguson is professor of race and critical theory. He is the author of Aberrations in Black: Toward a Queer of Color Critique (2004) and The Reorder of Things: The University and Its Pedagogies of Minority Difference (2012). He is also the co-editor with Grace Hong of Strange Affinities: The Gender and Sexual Politics of Comparative Racialization (2011).