May 20–22, 2021

The Spring 2021 edition of Political Concepts at Brown invites the featured graduate speakers and the conference participants more broadly to generate and rethink concepts from the positions of the student. The conference addresses a moment of crisis indicated in the U.S. by the failure to contain the coronavirus pandemic, sustained state violence against Black Americans, and increasingly active White supremacist movements. Proposed as early as April of last year, all the concepts to be discussed from across the humanities and social sciences link the structural conditions of, as well as the persistence of popular resistance to, this crisis. The conference wagers that graduate students have a distinctive political role as intellectual workers whose avowal of their lack of knowledge drives their will to generate concepts—insisting that the world is not reducible to what already is, but might be otherwise.

See the schedule and register!

The event, hosted by the Cogut Institute for the Humanities, is organized by Brown University graduate students Felicia Denaud (Africana Studies), Jeffrey Feldman (Political Science), Julia Huggins (Modern Culture and Media), Kristen Maye (Africana Studies), Marah Nagelhout (English), Rachel Nusbaum (Political Science), and Nick Pisanelli (English).

Brown University co-sponsors: Hispanic Studies, Italian Studies, Modern Culture and Media and the Malcolm S. Forbes Center for Culture and Media Studies, Religious Studies, and the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs.

Image: “Almost Heaven” by Tate Hudson.