Critical Humanities Spaces Network in Paris, Nov 18-19, and Book Discussion Series
Utopic Performances: Reimagining the Common
The CHCI Critical Humanities Spaces Network's second event of the year will take place on November 18-19 at the School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences in Paris. The title is: Utopic Performances: Reimagining the Common. We hope some of you will come and participate in the conversations with the scholars, artists, architects, and others who will be taking part in our panels. The event will primarily be in English.
The following is our event statement, followed by a list of partners. We are pleased to announce that three of our partners have joined or are joining the CHCI: the Center for Research in the Arts and Literature (CRAL) at the School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences, Paris; the Maisons des sciences de l'homme (a network of humanities and social science research institutes in France), and the Center for the Study of Contemporary Culture in Barcelona.
Event statement:
Confronted with the acute crisis of the constitution of the common, from the representation of the citizen to its articulation in the social body, the reconfiguring capacities of utopic imagination will be examined from a variety of contemporary aesthetic reflexions and practices which redefine the relationships between peoples, institutions and their ecologies. Within the understanding that utopic practice, in the same gesture, projects modes of inhabiting still to be realised and critiques the underlying facticity of the present, in this convening thinkers, researchers, architects, curators and artists will examine the immanent impacts of utopic discourses and practices. This instance of collaborative work and search for a necessary language of understanding between academic disciplines and artistic practices, and the fluidity that unsettles these distinctions, at the antipodes of evasive illusion, seeks to emphasize and assume the very responsibility inscribed in the utopic as a mandate to make space for what has not taken place.
“Utopic Performances: Reimagining the Common” has been organized by the Critical Humanities Spaces Network (CHSN, CHCI) with the support of the Centre de recherches sur les arts et le langage (CRAL, EHESS) the Fondation Maison des sciences de l’homme (FMSH), and the Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona (CCCB). Funding for the project was provided by the Consortium of Humanities Centers and Institutes (CHCI) and its Membership Activity Fund.
For a detailed schedule of this event, please go here. This event is free and open to the public. To sign up to attend, please email utopicperformances@gmail.com.
Click here for a recording of our May panel at the Berkeley CHCI meeting,"The Humanities As Risk," and please visit our webpage for more information on our network and access to past events.
Book Discussion Series
One of the key takeaways from our network meeting at the CHCI was a keen desire for us to create more spaces in which centres and institutes can learn from each other as we approach the work of inventing critical humanities spaces. One suggestion was for us to establish a monthly or bi-monthly online forum, where we can discuss key texts from our different sites and locations, that speak to critical practices and ideas that we are trying to implement. This would be an opportunity to "learn to learn" from each other, and to engage and network around upcoming events, questions, and problems. To achieve this we thought it would be helpful to convene a book discussion platform, and for this we are soliciting some ideas about what to read, and whom to have discuss the texts. We are also keen to explore co-hosting with institutes and centres that might be organising a book discussion that could be made into a hybrid event.
Please feel free to email your suggestions to either Katharine Wallerstein or Maurits van Bever Donker, and don't forget to sign up to our mailing list!