American Cultures and Global Contexts Center

2022-2023

Art: Enrique Chagoya, Shark’s Ink, Illegal Alien’s Guide to the Concept of Relative Surplus Value, 2009, color lithograph on Amate paper, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Museum purchase through the Luisita L. and Franz H. Denghausen Endowment, 2010.26, © 2009, Shark’s Ink

Living Theory

Continuing our multi-year inquiry into the Global Imagination of Racial Justice, the ACGCC is organizing a series of workshops on the practice of Living Theory. We are hoping to build on the energy and excitement of our Spring gathering, which brought together cultural theorists, literary critics, and social scientists with poets, writers, and visual and performance artists to be mutually inspired towards decolonial praxis and racial justice. Among the many moments that stayed with us were those in which the framing concepts for the conference were put into practice in concrete ways: whether through word-making, art-making, pedagogy, or other enactments of creative-critical methodology. This year we are inviting speakers who put their theoretical and conceptual work into practice, offering new ways of being in and working beyond the academy—whether crafting a poetics of aliveness; bridging written and spoken word and song; writing through lived and habitual experience; or translating care into pedagogy. Please join us for a series of workshops on writing, creativity, and teaching as we enliven our practice of work in crisis and in community.

Spring 2023

Winter 2023