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Towards a Global Humanities: Critical Traditions from the Global South will convene scholars for an intensive two-week Institute on the emergence and evolution, across disciplines, of critical intellectual engagements with a wide range of historical and contemporary experiences of the Global South. The Institute will re-examine paradigmatic shifts within these critical traditions, asking what a "global humanities" means, and what it might look like in today's world. The Institute will invoke and respond to intellectual currents of the past in order to open up space for radical reinterpretations of foundational ideas and conceptions in the present. Discussion and debate will be configured around four main thematic clusters. Each cluster will combine discussions and workshops, designed to engage ongoing scholarship by participants who work in that field. Participants will present their own work, in the form of written papers, visual presentations, creative projects, or performance pieces where applicable, and will receive comments both from their peers and from leading scholars in their field.

Theories from the Global South will examine four critical traditions: Subaltern Studies ; black radical anti-colonial thought ; post-colonial theory ; and theories about the coloniality of power and knowledge . Rather than view these theoretical formulations as coherent systems, this cluster will consider how these bodies of thought have been in dialogue with critical traditions from elsewhere, while simultaneously asking questions specifically addressed to their places of origin.   It will consider how various thinkers have staked out and contested different positions, in order to probe questions that are unique to the human experiences of the Global South.  This cluster will explore which theoretical positions remain vital and useful, and which may have exhausted themselves in the contemporary moment.  It will then ask which new genealogies of theory best articulate and facilitate analysis, interpretation and conceptualization of today’s world, while establishing connections between discursive and conceptual fields.       

Theorizing Violence will look at how different disciplines and intellectual traditions have framed and interpreted violence, and how they have interrogated the relationship between the articulation of violence and structural injustices. Faculty will explore how violence has been 'disciplined' in different ways in relation to different scripts of political life, different political-economies of rationality and irrationality, different theories of continuity and social change and different technologies of governance and subjectivity. This will also be necessarily an interrogation of how the 'effects' of violence are described, assessed and complicated in competing narratives of victimization and redemption, and the stakes they carry for how struggles over resources and meanings are legitimized and contested.

Opening Up Epistemes will focus on indigenous knowledge systems and the productive tensions that emerge from the imbrications of different knowledge traditions. This cluster will explore some of the spaces, both conceptual and performative, where two "epistemological meta-catetories" - global sciences and local indigenous knowledge systems - increasingly interact, especially in the realms of the life sciences, design and new media. Central to this exploration will be critical reflections on some of the key concepts, discourses and practices from multiple knowledge traditions, through an open-ended dialogue between participants and reflective practitioners, as well as academic experts.

Trauma, History, Memory and Democracy will pose a set of profound political questions about what democracy means and looks like in places where historical injustices continue to leave marks and social legacies. This cluster will focus on the institutional dimensions of those questions, reflecting on the roles and limits of formal political equality and representative liberal institutions, as well as alternative institutional frameworks for mediating claims to representation and justice. It will also look at the ways in which we have come to talk and think about politics and democracy in the contemporary world, grappling with new political obligations, as well as new political communities, that emerge from historical memories of trauma. What this all means for conceptions of citizenship, national identity, freedom and sovereignty are further issues to be explored.

Convening Faculty:

Anthony Bogues
Harmon Family Professor of Africana Studies, Department Chair
Professor of Political Science

Areas of Interest: Intellectual and cultural history, radical political thought, critical theory, Caribbean and African politics and literature.
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Vasuki Nesiah
Director of International Affairs
Lecturer, Watson Institute for International Studies

Areas of Interest: The law and politics of human rights and international interverntion, feminist theory, critical theory and postcolonial studies.
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Geri Augusto

Special Projects, Office of the President

Adjunct Assistant Professor of Public Policy

Taubman Center for Public Policy

Areas of Interest: Transnational and translocal knowledge, local/indigenous knowledge systems, social and cultural dynamics of technological innovation, international development, bioscience and biotechnology policy in the Global South.
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