"Contemporary Chinese Capitalism and Its Critical Landscape" This talk draws on a work in progress entitled Revolutionary China and its Late Capitalist Fate, an analysis of the nature of post-reform China's political economy, with particular attention to how this has affected everyday life, intellectual and critical work, ideological formation, cultural production, social movements, political action, and […]

"Roots in Air: People/Plants/Ethics in Suspension" Out of the urban ruins and food deprivation of World War II came the prototype for growing plants aeroponically. Aeroponics has since taken surprising turns as a technology for anthropocenic conditions – in Global South laboratories; “vertical gardens”; art installations; plant biology experiments for colonizing the cosmos. In its […]

Socratic Economics Martin Devecka is in the early stages of a research project on leisure and labor in fourth-century Athens.  His work explores the processes through which competing claims to leisure and to the labor of others led to the privileging of politics as a way of thinking about collective action. Martin Devecka is an […]

Johan Mathew’s current project, Opiates of the Masses: Labor, Narcotics, and Global Capitalism, explores the history of narcotics in order to interrogate the concepts of “consumer demand” and “rational choice” in market exchange, focusing on the consumption of narcotics by workers in Asia and Africa to alleviate the stresses of labor under capitalism. Johan Matthew […]

This talk emerges from Professor Bashir’s current project, Islamic Pasts and Futures: Conceptual Explorations, a critique of the conceptualization of Islamic history in modern scholarship. Bashir suggests alternatives emphasizing multiple temporalities and engaging contemporary academic debates regarding language, historiography, and history on the basis of materials of Islamic provenance. Shahzad Bashir is professor in Islamic […]