In this talk, Dr. Benner will discuss his current work exploring the idea of a Universal Technology Dividend. He will explore questions related to the common-property characteristics of technology and innovation, the monopolistic characteristics of information markets, and the need to rethink how we define work in contemporary labor markets. Event Photos:   Chris Benner is […]

“Apartheid Remains” explores how people subjected to life in a patchwork landscape of industry and residence in the Indian Ocean City of Durban, South Africa, have sought to contest their social and spatial subjection across the 20th century, particularly in the revolutionary 1970s and 1980s, and in today’s racial capitalism. Event Photos:   Sharad Chari […]

“Tropical Exceptions - Racial Logics in Twentieth Century Intergovernmental Age of Consent Debates" Legal age standards for sexual maturity are challenging enough to devise at the state or national level, but they are especially contentious at the intergovernmental level. Efforts at setting common standards have often been marked by imperial logics on the part of those […]

Kevin Dawson’s scholarship examines how enslaved Africans carried swimming, surfing, canoe-making, and canoeing skills to the Americas where they informed slave culture and were exploited by slaveholders. “History Below the Waterline” considers how enslaved Africans employed as salvage divers transformed shipwrecks, especially sunken Spanish treasure ships, into hinter-seas of economic production. Scholars typically situate seaports […]

This talk, like the book from which it is drawn, calls into question the imperative of economic growth, tracing the unintended consequences of escalating consumption.  Using a series of linked cases of successful economic growth (water, roads, and cattle in Botswana), it shows how insatiable growth, predicated on consumption, will inevitably overwhelm, a process Dr. […]

  Dr. Limbrick’s forthcoming book on Moumen Smihi connects the Moroccan filmmaker’s modernism to the Nahda or “Arab Renaissance” of the 19th-20th century, which re-energized Arab culture in dialogue with other languages and discourses. Offering new ways to think about world cinema and modernism in the region, Limbrick argues that Smihi’s radically beautiful films take […]

This week's Center Center for Cultural Studies Colloquium has been cancelled. See you next week! The Center for Cultural Studies hosts a weekly Wednesday colloquium featuring work by faculty and visitors. The sessions consist of a 40-45 minute presentation followed by discussion. We gather at noon, with presentations beginning at 12:15 PM. Participants are encouraged to […]

An Alternative Legacy of Modernity” Insurgent Universality offers a new way of thinking political universality that radically differs from the legal universalism of human rights and cosmopolitanism. Assuming a conception of history that is not linear but articulated in a multiverse of historical temporalities, Insurgent Universality excavates an alternative trajectory of modernity, which originally bridges […]