2026-27 GRANT RECIPIENTS
- Unruly Form
- Architectures of Global Raciality: Space, Violence, and Empire
- Material Literacy and Epistemic Justice
- The Unknowing Subject
- Culture, Society, and (Anti)Imperialism
UNRULY FORM
In her critique of the archive and museum–purported guardians of the past in their documents-based and object-based mission of preservation–as institutions of violation and destruction, Ariella Aïsha Azoualy (2019) offers a meditation on unruly objects. She recounts the transfer of 300 art objects from the department of Arts de l’Islam in the Louvre in Paris to the museum’s branch in Abu Dhabi to celebrate its opening in 2017. However, upon the crates’ opening, the objects were revealed to have “suffered chemically.” Drawing on artist Walid Raad’s installation “Scratching on things I could disavow,” Azoulay asserts that “the objects went out of control–they aspired to be what they were not and ceased to be what they were” (155). They refused the taxonomic violence of imperial capture, containment, and preservation.
It is from Azoulay’s appreciation of the potential histories and what is rendered unruly that we begin this group. We also turn to understandings and theorizations of unruliness from emerging scholarship in feminist and queer studies, critical disability studies, and posthumanism. Echoing Elizabeth Freeman (2010), much of the earlier and what is considered foundational queer theory was grounded in a belief that “truly queer queers would dissolve forms, disintegrate identities, level taxonomies, scorn the social, and even repudiate politics altogether)” (xiii). However, in working through the tension of “unruly form,” we hope to push back against the assumption of queer antiformalism and instead explore the possibilities of other forms and other humanisms that have persisted as means of living, even in their aspirations and belief in what may be deemed a “seemingly outlandish possible future” (78).
Far from a wholly aesthetic category, “form,” our reading group thus understands it more generally as “all shapes and configurations, all ordering principles, all patterns of repetition and difference” (Levine 2017), in order to place literary formalism into dialogue with an analysis of structure in the humanities and social sciences. As an organizing principle, form provides order, governing the structure of art objects as it does social and political life. Situated in history, forms “travel” and depend on the matter of their objects across different institutions, times, and cultures. “Unruly form,” this apparent contradiction in terms, thus forms the chief theoretical basis with which we read capaciously for both the material resistance of the object and the form's enduring aesthetic and sociopolitical value for literary and cultural studies, history, and anthropology.
Alongside scholarly interrogations that manifest in the form of academic monographs and anthologies, we engage with works that press on the form of poetry, prose, and film. As such we will traverse across extensions on twentieth-century anticolonial thought that contend with the twenty-first century desire of planetary empire “to govern environments and the material forms of bodies, human and nonhuman” (Ahuja 2016, 4) to manipulations and speculations of futures that are attentive to the unconscious processes seeking a free play of the imagination. Ultimately, in an era of forever impending crisis and catastrophe, our hope is to plot the queer coordinates of livability that endure.
Members
Edna Wan – Department of Literatures in English
John Undaloc – Department of Literatures in English
Namfon Choochan – Department of History
Saomai Phuong Nguyen – Department of History
Valentina Guerrero Chala – Department of Anthropology
Amrita Chakraborty – Department of Comparative Literature
ARCHITECTURES OF GLOBAL RACIALITY: SPACE, VIOLENCE, AND EMPIRE
Our reading group comes together through our shared interests in examining race, space, and violence as co-constitutive elements of the modern world. Taking Denise Ferreira da Silva’s claim that racism is the primary ontological organizing principle of the modern world inaugurated under slavery, we begin from the premise that racism not only produces race as a category of difference, but also, and even more insidiously, is a structuring force that organizes the modern world spatially and politically. Da Silva argues that modern thought divides subjects into those recognized as self-determining historical agents and those understood as determined by external forces and therefore neither fully human nor fully historical subjects. We build on this insight to explore how this division is not only conceptual but spatial, taking form in global distinctions such as "North" and "South", "citizen" and "migrant", and "protected" and "disposable."
We ask—how does race structure the production of space, and how are architectures of violence embedded within this ordering? How might we understand genocide not as an exceptional rupture, but as structurally embedded within racial modernity and exceeding the explanatory limits of legal and humanitarian frameworks? We seek to examine how genocidal violence is continuous with (settler) colonial “logics of elimination” and racial regimes through which certain populations "must" disappear for national and imperial projects to cohere.
Our inquiry situates the modern nation-state within the intertwined histories of coloniality and racial capitalism. We are particularly interested in how bordering practices, citizenship regimes, and state sovereignty reproduce racial distinctions while disavowing their colonial foundations. Drawing on Nandita Sharma and others, we investigate how postcolonial nation-statehood remains structured through the separation of “natives” and “migrants.” Attending to the circulation of racial logics through adaptable modalities rather than fixed geographies, our readings move between Europe, Africa, Asia, and the Americas and addresses topics including race-as-technology, the diffusion of imperial violence through nation-state formation, and the spatial production of scarcity.
The group places particular emphasis on spatial and architectural approaches to these questions. Through work in architectural history and urban studies (e.g. Weizman, Allais, Abujidi), we explore how built environments, territorial practices, and visual regimes materialize racial power and enable forms of slow and spectacular violence, including urbicide and spacio-cide. Complicating Foucauldian biopolitics, we also engage Achille Mbembe’s "necropolitics" to ask how sovereignty is increasingly exercised through the production of “death worlds,” especially in postcolonial and occupied spaces.
Our reading list reflects the interdisciplinary composition of the group, whose members work across architectural history, Africana studies, and information science. Across our sessions, we will move between key theoretical texts on raciality and globality (da Silva, Wynter, Spillers, Hartman), work on racial capitalism and empire (Sharma, Warren, Tilley) and architectural and geographical analyses of occupation, environment and extractive infrastructure (Weizman, Akcan, Sharpe, Yusoff).
Our reading group seeks to create a collaborative space for examining raciality as a spatial logic of modernity, while also engaging alternative grammars for (un)naming and resisting ongoing colonial and genocidal violence. Across anthropology, Africana studies, Black Critical Theory, and architectural history, we aim to investigate how racial and spatial logics organize the distribution of life and death in the modern world.
Members
Sara Ather – Department of Architecture, History of Architecture and Urban Development
Yakin Kinger – Department of Architecture, History of Architecture and Urban Development
Jamie Lu – Department of Information Science
Katie Rueff – Robert S. Harrison College Scholar Program
Angela Shyaka – Department of Architecture, History of Architecture and Urban Development
Alexander van Biema – Africana Studies and Research Center
MATERIAL LITERACY AND EPISTEMIC JUSTICE
Composed of members in Medieval Studies, Black Studies, Apparel Design, and Literatures in English, our reading group is grounded in a shared commitment to pursuing epistemic justice in the archive through a praxis of material literacy. If literacy signals a strong sense of knowledge in a particular area, then "material literacy" opens us to the question: what does it mean to "know" matter? That is, how do different systems of knowledge structure relationships between matter and meaning? And specifically given the centrality of archival research to each of our own projects, how does the "archive"––as a particularly salient site of knowledge and knowledge production––formalize these dynamics?
Our approach to these questions is guided by critical archival scholarship, which contends that the dominant contemporary approaches to knowledge and knowledge production emerge within and (re)produce structures of violence and inequalities. Following Azoulay and Jackson, our reading group is thus interested in tracing the epistemic contours of these injustices as they give shape to mater/ial meaning. Specifically given our interdisciplinary backgrounds, we ground ourselves in the study of the west and the "modern world" at the nexus of Black Critical Theory and Art History. We situate ourselves in the field's recent scholarship compellingly contending that the production of modern form and formal distinctions in general––and the form of the archive and its institutions (namely museums) in particular––is enabled through the conscription, abjection, and annihilation of "othered" bodies. In particular, we follow Bradley and Marriott's emphasis that in the longue dureé of western imperialism, this dynamic of modern form/al production is constitutively racialized. Thus, our approach to material literacy in the aim of epistemic justice descends with the history of western archival studies and traces shifting relationships between matter and meaning through a particular focus on late medieval and early modern racialized productions of "the body."
We plan to begin with a survey of critical approaches to the archive. Here, we bring together our members' investments in literature, materiality, and the archive to extend critical approaches to the archive toward a deconstruction of the form/al production of the body. First reading Mahmood, Cooke, and Brennan, we investigate how "the subject" is (re)constructed through the nation-state.
Members
Kyle Gunning – Medieval Studies Program
Iris Luo – Human Centered Design, College of Human Ecology
Kiran Mohammadi-William – Medieval Studies Program
Katie Rueff – Robert S. Harrison College Scholar Program
Yichu Wang – Department of Literatures in English
THE UNKNOWING SUBJECT
Reading across anthropology, political theory, philosophy, psychoanalysis, and literature, this reading group explores the question of unknowing in human subjectivity. Moving from the Cartesian “I think, therefore I am" to the Lacanian “I am where I am not thinking,” conceptions of subjectivity have maintained a shifting relationship to knowledge. Across psychoanalysis, critical theory, and contemporary social thought, the subject increasingly emerges not as fully self-knowing, but as constituted through unconscious desires, repression, denial, fantasy, and obscured structures of power. The modern subject, in this sense, unknows itself as much as it knows itself.
The collection of texts in this reading group explores how processes of denial, willful ignorance, repression, historical silencing, and traumatic muteness shape social and political life across different contexts. Rather than focusing solely on visible and conscious processes of subject formation, we are interested in how the unknown dimensions of subjectivity structure people’s relationships to violence, climate catastrophe, colonialism, collective memory, and the political “Other,” as well as how individuals and collectives live with what cannot be fully acknowledged, represented, or articulated.
We begin with theoretical approaches to unknowing and ignorance. As a starting point, we draw on Robert DeNicola's (2017) philosophical work on ignorance and the extent to which we are able to know the unknown. We then situate unknowing within modern epistemological regimes that produce forms of collective amnesia and disavowal (O’Gorman 2017), cruel attachments and impossible desires (Berlant 2011), and unthinkable global events under colonialism and imperialism (Trouillot 2015; Žižek 2002).
The second part of the group turns to climate change as one of the most urgent contemporary sites of organized unknowing in human subjectivity today. Climate catastrophe generates experiences that are simultaneously hyper-visible and difficult to grasp emotionally, politically, and aesthetically. We explore how climate change produces denial and repression across capitalist political economy, literature, and everyday life: through ideological ignorance in the Global North (DeLay 2024), literary failures of representation (Ghosh 2016), and the social organization of denial in communities directly affected by ecological destruction (Norgaard 2011).
The final section examines unknowing in relation to political violence, atrocity, and historical trauma. Here we engage with works on denial and moral responsibility in the face of mass violence (Cohen 2001; Butler 2009; Margalit 2025), alongside scholars who grapple with the limits of reconstructing and representing violent realities and historical erasure (Hartman 2019; LaCapra 2001; Mangual-Figueroa 2024; Navaro-Yashin 2012). We conclude with the novel The City & the City by China Miéville, exploring how speculative fiction can address forms of imposed invisibility, repression, and social erasure in ways unavailable to conventional social theory archive and its defining mechanisms of collecting, ordering, and preserving. Through Hartman, we next index this relationship as a particular extension of the modern world's abstraction, disfiguration, and annihilation of racialized bodies. Staying with this line of inquiry, we move through selections from da Silva and Terada to investigate the archive's (re)mediation of "the body" as an always already "given" form.
Lastly, we raise the question of scale to expand on the confluences the archive formalizes between matter and meaning at the site of the production of "the body." Here we draw on museum studies (e.g.: Kim and Turner) and historiographies of science (e.g.: Redman; Wolfe and Gal) to analyze how institutionalization simultaneously exacerbates, diffuses, and solidifies violently constructed form/al distinctions. To that end, in the aim of epistemic justice and the long undoing of modern form, we will intermittently pair our readings with rigorous and guided engagements in primary sources. Selected based on our members' particular interests in textiles (Harris et al.), poetry/literature (Gasché), and the history of science (Harpham and Kurtz), each source foregrounds the racialized production of "the body."
Members
Or Aroch, Department of Anthropology
Josie Callahan, Department of Science and Technology Studies
Phoebe Chu, Department of Government
Yui Sasajima, Department of Anthropology
CULTURE, STRUGGLE, AND (ANTI) IMPERIALISM
Marxist approaches to culture are plentiful – ranging from the works of Gramsci, the Frankfurt School, to the writings of the New Left and the Birmingham school, to structuralisms and post-structuralisms, and to the emergence of Marxism and Culture within the United States. While these texts offer critical interventions around the questions of ideology, consciousness, subject formation, and interpellation, these writings are often not only Eurocentric in scope but also seldom consider the question of imperialism. This reading group hopes to attend to this
limitation by 1) challenging the Eurocentrism of Marxist approaches to culture, and 2) exploring the importance of culture as it pertains to imperialism. Together we hope to address a few central questions: How is culture mobilized in service of empire and in struggles against it? What kinds of marginalized Marxisms can be mobilized to enrich our understanding of subject formationunder imperialist capitalism?
Each session of our reading group will pair a range of theoretical texts on Marxism and culture with films, which will serve as sites of both imperialist and anti-imperialist struggle in international contexts. The films for this group will include classic works of Third Cinema (Mrinal, 1980; Guzman, 1975; Kalatazov, 1965; Solanas, 1968) to explore cinema as a site of anti-colonial and anti-imperialist struggle, as well as Asian and diasporic films (Sen, 1980; Zhang, 1985; Mehta, 2005) to locate the anti-imperialist possibilities embedded in everyday life. We will also look at cinema as a site of capitalist and imperialist ideology, looking at anticommunist Cold War productions (Frankenheimer, 1962) and the cultural productions of the so-called “war on terror” (Affleck, 2012). Our reading group will begin with a theoretical overview of foundational texts in the political-economic theories of imperialism (Marx, 1990; Lenin, 1966; 1969; Rodney, 1974), tracing the historically materialist methods with which to
study how the capitalist mode of production depends on colonialism, unequal exchange, and the de-development of the Global South. We will then work through contemporary debates on the status of Marxist intellectual production within Euro-America and beyond (Rockhill, 2025; Anderson, 2016), and foundational works on ideology and hegemony (Gramsci, 2012; Hall, 2019; 2021; Althusser, 2012).
After building some foundations on questions of imperialism, Marxism, and culture, our group will turn to questions on revolutionary consciousness, revolution, and counter-revolution. We will examine how films and other cultural texts mediate sociopolitical forces and texture the theoretical advances made in postcolonial studies (Fanon,1961; Spivak 1985), cultural studies (Hall, 1990), literary studies (Kanafani, 1967), and political theory (Cabral, 1972; Mao, 1942; Jackson 1972).
Our reading group aims to draw from the interdisciplinary backgrounds of our members, spanning critical development, comparative and English literatures, political ecology, and anthropology, to develop new analytical insights for anti-imperialist struggle. Not only are we engaging with theory and media, but we will also interrogate the forms and methods of knowledge production that are possible in an institution such as Cornell. Can we put into practice counterhegemonic forms of critical and intellectual production, informed by Global South movements and struggle in the Global North, without reproducing imperialist forms of
knowledge.
Members
Ahmed Amr – Department of Anthropology
Terry Guo – Department of Comparative Literature
Adhy Kim (Faculty) – Department of Literatures in English
Josefina Rodriguez Pletikosic – Department of Global Development
Katie Rohrbaugh – Department of Soil and Crop Sciences
Nazanin Zarepour – Department of Comparative Literature