With the rise of tribalism and nationalism throughout the world, questions of collective identity and belonging have surged to prominence in recent years. Across numerous disciplines and discourses, a key dilemma has taken shape: how to reconcile the legitimate yearning for rootedness and locality, with the fluidity and porousness of an increasingly global age. On the one hand, prevailing responses to this dilemma, including those shaped by predominant forms of nationalism, liberalism, and globalism, are struggling to resolve the tension. On the other hand, a range of perspectives deriving from alternate sites of collective life and value—for example, indigenous communities, postcolonial and social justice movements, religion, environmental movements, and cosmopolitan networks—cast the dilemma in a different light. This series brings together leading thinkers from a variety of perspectives to examine and reframe the crises of identity that confront us in a rapidly changing global age, and to think deeply about how humanity might resolve them.
Sponsored by the Kenan Institute for Ethics at Duke University, the Institute for Public Knowledge at New York University, and COMIT.
Friday, December 10th, 10 AM – 11:30 AM ET | What Makes Humanity? Identities, Relationships, and a New Cosmopolitanism
Craig Calhoun University Professor of Social Sciences at Arizona State University. Previously, he was president of the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) and the Social Science Research Council (SSRC). He is author of Neither Gods Nor Emperors: Students and the Struggle for Democracy in China (1997) and the forthcoming Cosmopolitanism and Belonging: From European Integration to Global Hopes and Fears.Achille Mbembe is a Research Professor of History and Politics at the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research in Johannesburg, South Africa and Professor at the European Graduate School. He is author of On the Postcolony (2001), Critique of Black Reason (2016), Necropolitics (2019), and Out of the Dark Night: Essays on Decolonization (2020).David Palmer is a Professor jointly at the Hong Kong Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences and in the Department of Sociology at the University of Hong Kong. He is co-author of The Religious Question in Modern China (2010) and Dream Trippers: Global Daoism and the Predicament of Modern Spirituality (2017), and author of Qigong Fever: Body, Science and Utopia in China (2007).
Friday, January 28th, 3-4:30 PM ET | Identity, Spirituality, and Social Change
Akeel Bilgrami is a Sidney Morgenbesser Professor of Philosophy at Columbia University. He is author of Secularism, Identity, and Enchantment (2014) and a forthcoming book from Columbia University Press on Gandhi’s philosophy.Cornel West is a Dietrich Bonhoeffer Professor of Philosophy and Christian Practice at Union Theological Seminary and Professor Emeritus at Princeton University. He is author of Race Matters (1994) and Democracy Matters: Winning the Fight Against Imperialism (2004).
Friday, February 25th, 3- 4:30 PM ET | Identity and Alternative Visions of World Order
Or Rosenboim is a Senior Lecturer and Director of the Centre for Modern History at the Department of International Politics at City, University of London. She author of The Emergence of Globalism: Visions of World Order in Britain and the United States, 1939-1950 (2017).Inés Valdez is Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science at Ohio State University, where she directs the Latina/o Studies Program. She is author of Transnational Cosmopolitanism: Kant Du Bois, and Justice as a Political Craft (2019).
Friday, April 22nd, 3-4:30 PM ET | Identity, Justice, and the Future of “Race”
Barbara J. Fields. is Professor in the Department of History at Columbia University. She is author of Slavery and Freedom on the Middle Ground: Maryland during the Nineteenth Century (1985) and co-author of Racecraft: The Soul of Inequality in American Life (2012).Derik Smith is Associate Professor of Literature at Claremont McKenna College. He is author of Robert Hayden in Verse: New Histories of African American Poetry and the Black Arts Era (2018).
Friday, May 6th, 3-4:30 PM ET | Identity, Liberalism, and Democracy in America
Juliet Hooker is Professor of Political Science at Brown University. She author of Race and the Politics of Solidarity (2009) and Theorizing Race in the Americas: Douglass, Sarmiento, Du Bois, and Vasconcelos (2017).Samuel Moyn is Henry R. Luce Professor of Jurisprudence at Yale Law School and Professor of History at Yale University. He is the author of The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History (2010) and Not Enough: Human Rights in an Unequal World (2018).
Thursday, May 26, 3 – 4:30 PM EST | Beyond “Recognition”: Self, Other, and the Making of Collective Identities in Colonial Contexts
Glen Coulthard is Associate Professor in the First Nations and Indigenous Studies Program and in the Department of Political Science at the University of British Columbia. He is author of Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition (2014).Arturo Escobar is Professor of Anthropology at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. He is author of Encountering Development: The Making and Unmaking of the Third World (1995) and Designs for the Pluriverse: Radical Interdependence, Autonomy, and the Making of Worlds (2018).
