Casa Hispánica, 612 West 116th Street
Justice-in-Education
Institute for Comparative Literature and Society (ICLS), The Society of Fellows and Heyman Center for the Humanities, African American & African Diaspora Studies Department & Institute for Research in African American Studies, Columbia School of Journalism, Department of English and Comparative Literature,
Department of History, Department of Latin American and Iberian Cultures, Sing Sing Prison Museum
Tamer Center for Social Enterprise
Since January, we have found ourselves under unprecedented conditions, from a sustained assault on the university as an institution to the concerted assault on political, human, environmental, and social rights. Even though unprecedented in this country, the current moment is recognizable as having existed before in commensurable iterations elsewhere. Last spring, Justice Forum held an open discussion in which we engaged in discussion and considered this new iteration of governmentality in the country: is it authoritarianism? Fascism? Totalitarianism? Dictatorship? Junta? Techno-feudalism? Just plain avarice? Or something else, yet unnamed because of its novelty? We considered problems of academic practice (academic asylum, academic freedom, the right to pose questions); the imperative of the law; modes of activist thinking, and the proleptic importance of definitions.
This semester, a year into this new landscape, and in the wake of a mayoral election in the city that has the potential to change the map, this panel will embark on a discussion about the futurity of the current moment. We will glance back at the questions from last spring, tracing the currents and the subcurrents of our lived experience, of our exposure to formations of violence that are both recognizable and otherworldly, as they spell out a future where no one and nothing is safe, earned or sacred. Prison and exile, human and civil rights, independent research and scholarship, are now in a present that has eroded any remnants of the social welfare state and is sculpted by personal whim and profit. The panelists will engage in short, emergent positions, no longer than 5 minutes each, hold a discussion among the panelists for twenty minutes, and open the space for discussion with the audience.
About the Panelists
Bruno Bosteels is Dean of Humanities and Jesse and George Siegel Professor in the Humanities in the Department of Latin American and Iberian Cultures, with a joint appointment in the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society. Prior to returning to Columbia in 2016, he taught for many years at Harvard and Cornell University. His research covers a wide range of topics in literature, culture, and politics in modern Latin America as well as contemporary philosophy and political theory.
Imani Jacqueline Brown is an artist, activist, writer, and architectural researcher, a doctoral candidate in Geography at Queen Mary, University of London. Currently Imani is a Dean’s Visiting Professor at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture and Public Planning Her work investigates the continuum of extractivism, which spans from settler-colonial genocide and slavery to fossil fuel production and climate change. She received her MA in Forensic Architecture with distinction from the Centre for Research Architecture at Goldsmiths, University of London (2019) and her BA in Anthropology and Visual Arts from Columbia University (2010). From 2020-2025, she worked as an Advanced Researcher at Forensic Architecture. Her GSAPP studio, themed Architecture of Solidarity, invites students to investigate the University as an attractor basin of fascist complicity and antifascist solidarity.
Bernard E. Harcourt is a contemporary critical theorist, advocate, and the author most recently of Cooperation: A Political, Economic, and Social Theory (Columbia UP, 2023). The Isidor and Seville Sulzbacher Professor of Law and Professor of Political Science at Columbia University, Harcourt is also the Founding Director of the Columbia Center for Contemporary Critical Thought and a directeur d’études (chaired professor) at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris. His book, Critique & Praxis (Columbia, 2020), won the 46th annual Lionel Trilling Prize.
Nikolas P. Kakkoufa (Ph.D. King’s College London) is Senior Lecturer in Modern Greek and Director of Undergraduate Studies in Classics, Ancient Studies, and Hellenic Studies at Columbia University. His work bridges queer theory, reception studies, and Modern Greek and Cypriot literature, often tracing how literature and culture shape—and are shaped by—questions of identity, belonging, grief, and the body. He has held research fellowships at the University of Amsterdam and the University of Cambridge. His book in progress, A Queer History of Modern Greek Writing (1821–2021), follows two centuries of Greek literature to uncover how queer voices have navigated visibility, censorship, and reinvention, situating these narratives within shifting ideas of nationhood, cultural memory, and the intertwined queer histories of the Eastern Mediterranean. Comparative in scope, the project also examines how ancient texts have been appropriated by queer writers in Greece to both recreate and ultimately depart from this classical tradition.
Wilfredo Laracuente is a Work Readiness Instructor with Opportunities for a Better Tomorrow and a dedicated advocate for reentry and workforce development. He earned his Bachelor’s degree in Behavioral Science from Mercy College in 2019 while incarcerated and has since facilitated reentry workshops, mentored youth, and served as a Teaching Assistant for Columbia University’s Prison Education Program. Currently, he is a Beyond the Bars Fellow at Columbia University, focusing on trauma among incarcerated women—the fastest-growing prison population. Wilfredo brings both lived experience and professional expertise to his work, emphasizing transformation, equity, and opportunity.
Graciela Montaldo is a Professor in the Department of Latin American and Iberian Cultures, Columbia University. She specializes in modern and contemporary Latin American Cultures. She is co-editor of Routledge Companion to Nineteenth-Century Latin America (2024) and The Argentina Reader: History, Culture and Politics (2002 and 2026). She is the author of more than ten books, including her latest. Museum of Consumption. Archives of Mass Culture in Argentina (2021). She was Chair and Director of Graduate Studies of the Latin American and Iberian Cultures department.
