Dissident Aesthetics and the Remaking of Life
Spanning multiple geographies since the turn of the 20th century, this seminar is conceived as an intellectual, artistic, and pedagogical space for thinking together against despair. It is attentive to how the struggle over power, racism, belonging, gender, and sexuality has shaped and been reshaped by cultural and aesthetic practices over time. It asks how collective practices of dissent—especially aesthetic, cultural, and imaginative ones—can help remake life under conditions of intensified violence, extraction, exclusion, and erasure. Rather than beginning from abstract diagnosis of global crises alone, the seminar foregrounds its own purpose: To cultivate shared inquiry into how solidarities are formed, sustained, and made sensible through healing aesthetic strategies that affirm individual and collective dignity, interdependence, and life itself, particularly as they contest racial, ethnic, caste/class hierarchies, and patriarchal normative regimes of gender and sexuality. In other words, this seminar examines aesthetic manifestations of local and transglobal collective commitment to a flourishing life together and across the boundaries of our commonalities and differences.