Mass Intellectuality? An ICLS Annual Conference 2022

April 20, 2022 – Topics of Interest

Mass Intellectuality?
An ICLS Annual Conference
April 20 and 22, 2022

Long viewed as an engine of sociality mobility, the university is in crisis. Our day-long convening will inaugurate ongoing reflection on themes regarding the university as infrastructure and ideological apparatus including: the history of the disciplines, infrastructural histories of the university, dissent that have emerged from within and in opposition to the university, global histories of the university in relation to anticolonial activism and postcolonial state formation, the role of academic labor in histories of labor and organizing, and the complex investments in mass intellectuality and education for subaltern communities.

PLEASE NOTE THAT THIS PROGRAM IS ALL VIRTUAL WITH EXCEPTION TO THE HISTORICAL JUSTICE WALKING TOUR.

KEYNOTES:
SHAHZIA SIKANDER
(artist and theorist)
“Thinking Elsewhere: A Conversation with Shahzia Sikandar”
Date: Wednesday, April 20, 2022


DENISE FERREIRA DE SILVA
(Professor, Univ. British Columbia)
On Exhaustion: A Reading on Psychical Economy with responses by Saidiya Hartman and Anupama Rao
Date: Friday, April 22, 2022

APRIL 19, 2022 4:30PM-6:00PM Join us for a free Historical Justice Walking Tour with Tommy Song, Ambedkar Initiative.

APRIL 22, 2022
10:15AM – 1:30PM
Archive and University
Features student researchers on links between Columbia University, Harlem, and American interwar intellectual culture.


Roundtable Organized by Tommy Song, Anupama Rao
Participants: Sam de Ninno; Vik Joshi; Kyle Zarif; Yosan Alemu; Sam Needleman; Tommy Song; Vasundhara Mathur
Moderators: Demetrius Eudell; Thabisile Griffin; Anupama Rao

AGENDA
This past summer (2021) at Columbia, we launched a hybrid research seminar in history and comparative literature titled “Race, Caste, University: B. R. Ambedkar at Columbia.” Modeled after the Columbia University and Slavery seminar, the course represents several years of research and planning by myself and student researchers.

In establishing and teaching the course, we have come to realize the necessity for a wider conversation around race and caste, not simply because of their echoes of each other, but also because of the lack of clarity and agreement over their definitions and their relationship. Moreover, we have also come to recognize the university as a contested space, one that is simultaneously able to approach social justice and reproduce systemic inequities. As such, we hope to use this opportunity to outline how we might utilize the university as a means of relaying our research on these twin concepts to other scholars, thought leaders, and, perhaps more importantly, the public. 

12:45-1:30 PM
Reflections and general conversation led by Dr. Thabisile Griffin (ACLS Postdoctoral Fellow)

3:15-5:30PM 
Thinking the Universal: A Roundtable

A discussion about the relationship of intellectual and manual labor, historical comparison, social difference, and global itineraries of social thought with the following scholars: Nahum Chandler (UC Irvine); Simone Pinet (Cornell); Ajay Skaria (University of Minnesota); and Anupama Rao (Columbia University).
Location: Virtual only.

Co-sponsored by Columbia Global Thought, the Department of African-American and African Diaspora Studies, and the Institute for Research in African-American Studies.

Please email disability@columbia.edu to request disability accommodations. Advance notice is necessary to arrange for some accessibility needs.



 The Heyman Center for the Humanities, Room B-101
74 Morningside Drive
New York, NY, 10027
  (212) 854-4541
  (212) 854-3099