May 2024
Filmed at the Tamiment Library, NYU
Jordan T. Camp sat down with Elizabeth Robinson to talk about media, Cedric J. Robinson, and the Black radical archive for our Curating Conversations series in anticipation of Archives Unbound: 50 Years of Hope, Resistance, and Rebellion, a conference in celebration of Elizabeth and Cedric Robinson at UC Santa Barbara at the end of May.
Saturday, December 2, 2023
A conference at UC Berkeley co-hosted by the Trinity Social Justice Initiative, the Department of Geography and Townsend Center for the Humanities, UC Berkeley, and the International Gramsci Society
Italian Marxist theorist Antonio Gramsci developed his spatio-historical method of conjunctural analysis during the rise of fascism in Italy. He sought to understand the relations among political, economic, ideological, and military forces that were giving rise to this emergent movement and regime. Gramsci’s conjunctural analysis has become newly relevant to our own moment. Our conjuncture has been marked by multiple colliding crises, from relentless racism and vigilantism, gender violence, climate chaos, social polarization, structural unemployment, mass migration, resurgent militarism, the rise of the far right across the world, and a crisis of hegemony and for capitalism on a global scale. The challenge for scholars at present is to comprehend Gramsci’s conjunctural analysis in his own time while also “translating” his insights to confront the crises of our own.
This one-day, in-person symposium, hosted by the International Gramsci Society, the Trinity Social Justice Institute, The Townsend Center for the Humanities, and the UC Berkeley Department of Geography considers historical, spatial, and theoretical provocations posed by the Gramscian tradition in order to advance political and social theory for the present. In dialogue with scholars from across the disciplines, we will consider how we might produce spaces for conjunctural analysis and theoretical production adequate to the current conjuncture.
9:30am | Welcome
9:45am – 11:00am | Panel 1—Gramsci’s Relevance
11:00am – 11:30am | Break
11:30am – 12:30pm | Panel 2—Borders, Migration, and Uneven Development in the Mediterranean
12:30pm – 1:30pm | Lunch
1:30pm – 2:45pm | Panel 3—Geographies of Racial Capitalism and Imperialism
Jennifer Casolo delivered her presentation remotely, which you can watch below.
2:45pm – 3:00pm | Break
3:00pm – 4:15pm | Panel 4—Law, the State, and Social Movements
**Due to technical difficulties, the video for this panel is not available.**
4:15pm – 4:30pm | Break
4:30pm – 5:45pm | Panel 5—Reading Gramsci in the South
**Due to technical difficulties, the video for this panel is not available.**
6:00pm | Reception
Education Must Be Defended
Keynote Lecture by Anthony Bogues
Friday, March 3, 2023
4-6:30 p.m.
Rittenberg Lounge, Mather Hall, Trinity College and online
Hosted by the Trinity Social Justice Initiative and the Smart Cities Lab, Trinity College, and the Center for the Study of Slavery and Justice, Brown University
In the 1960s and 70s global anticolonial revolutionary thinkers were in open revolt against nationalist-driven racist attacks. Adjoining the major political campaigns of their day, they formed critical collaborative spaces of research, writing, and thinking. Participants included radical thinkers working outside the academy as well as those who considered themselves “in but not of” it. These included Cedric Robinson and Ambalavaner Sivanandan at the Institute of Race Relations in London, Sylvia Wynter at Atlanta’s Institute of the Black World, and Walter Rodney at Tanzania’s University of Dar es Salaam. The legacy of this generation informs this event, “Education Must Be Defended.”
This one-day conference, organized by the Social Justice Initiative and the Smart Cities Lab at Trinity College and the Center for the Study of Slavery and Justice at Brown University, considers the spatial, institutional, and pedagogical provocations posed by this tradition for the present day. Inspired by an earlier generation of radical intellectuals we will think together about how we might hold critical space for research and pedagogy amidst multiple colliding crises at present.
Image: A Black Students Union leader addresses a crowd of demonstrators in December 1968. Credit: Associated Press.
Christina Heatherton speaks with Judah Schept about his new book, Coal, Cages, Crisis: The Rise of the Prison Economy in Central Appalachia (NYU Press, 2022).
Conjuncture is a web series and podcast curated and co-produced by Jordan T. Camp and Christina Heatherton for the Trinity Social Justice Initiative. It features interviews with activists, artists, scholars, and public intellectuals. Taking its title from Antonio Gramsci and Stuart Hall’s conceptualization, it highlights the struggles over the meaning and memory of particular historical moments.
Judah Schept is Professor of Justice Studies at Eastern Kentucky University.
Christina Heatherton is the Elting Associate Professor of American Studies and Human Rights and Co-Director of the Social Justice Initiative at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut.
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Jordan T. Camp speaks with Thulani Davis about her new book, The Emancipation Circuit: Black Activism Forging a Culture of Freedom (Duke, 2022), Black political thought, and the unfinished business of freedom struggles.
Thulani Davis is a professor and a Nellie Y. McKay Fellow in the African American Studies Department at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.
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Christina Heatherton speaks with Isaac Kamola about manufactured campus culture wars, the resurgence of the right, and the politics of intellectual work in the current conjuncture.
Isaac A. Kamola is Associate Professor of Political Science at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut.
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Jordan T. Camp interviews Christina Heatherton about the relationship between the internationalization of capital and the making of internationalism in the era of the Mexican Revolution.
Christina Heatherton is Elting Associate Professor of American Studies and Human Rights and Co-Director of the Social Justice Initiative at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut.
If you like this podcast, please subscribe and rate us.