presenting the participants
In this page, you can get to know a little bit about the scholars that gave talks during the Global Condition Workshop and see some of their work.
bios
Laylah Ali
Laylah Ali is a is a contemporary visual artist known for paintings in which ambiguous race relations are depicted with a graphic clarity and cartoon strip format, as well as a Professor of Art at Williams College in Massachusetts, U.S.A.
The precision with which Ali creates her small, figurative, gouache paintings on paper is such that it takes her many months to complete a single work. Her most famous and longest-running series of paintings depict brown-skinned and gender-neutral Greenheads and have been included in the Venice Biennale (2003), and the Whitney Biennial (2004) and were the subject of a major touring exhibition in 2012-2013 that originated at the Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown, MA and traveled to the Weisman Museum, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN and the Herbert F. Johnson Museum, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY. Ali’s works are included in the permanent collections of numerous public institutions, including the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, NY; the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, IL; the Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; and the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN, among many others.
Links to work:
“Portraiture, Performance and Violence” - interview with Laylah Ali (click on interview title)
Laylah Ali: "Meaning"
phanuel antwi
Phanuel Antwi is assistant professor of English at University of British Columbia. He writes, researches, and teaches critical black studies; settler colonial studies; black Atlantic and diaspora studies; Canadian literature and culture since 1830; critical race, gender, and sexuality studies; and material cultures. He has published articles in Interventions, Affinities, and Studies in Canadian Literature, and he is completing a book-length project titled “Currencies of Blackness: Faithfulness, Cheerfulness and Politeness in Settler Writing.”
Links to work:
"The defenders" - Project for Circa Now (click on project title)
"Rough Play: Reading Black Masculinity in Austin Clarke’s “Sometimes, a Motherless Child”and Dionne Brand’s What We All Long For" (click on article title)
joanne barker
Joanne Barker is Lenape (a citizen of the Delaware Tribe of Indians). She is an associate professor of American Indian Studies Department at San Francisco State University. She has been the recipient of the Rockefeller Foundation Humanities Fellowship and the Ford Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship.
Joanne has published articles in numerous journals and edited and wrote the introduction to Sovereignty Matters: Locations of Contestation and Possibility in Indigenous Struggles for Self-Determination (University of Nebraska Press, 2005). She is currently completing her book, Native Acts: The Law of Cultural Authenticity, contracted with Duke University Press. She has been much involved in NAGPRA and related issues of Native cultural self-determination at SFSU and with local tribes and tribal communities.
Links to work:
"Tequila Sovereign" - critical work (click on name)
"Joanne Barker author" - science fiction critical work (click on name)
“The Science of Rights: Native Peoples' Historical Experiences and the (Un)Making of Humanity.” discussion of Barker’s research
Kodwo Eshun
Eshun's writing deals with cyberculture, science fiction and music with a particular focus on where these ideas intersect with the African diaspora. He has contributed to a wide range of publications, including The Guardian, The Face, The Wire, i-D, Melody Maker, Spin, Arena, Frieze, CR: The New Centennial Review and 032c.
He now publishes academically, and teaches at Goldsmiths, University of London, in the Department of Visual Cultures. Eshun’s research interests include contemporary art and critical theory with particular reference to postwar liberation movements, modern and contemporary musicality, cybernetic theory, the cinematic soundtrack and archaeologies of futurity. Eshun was one of the founders of The Otolith Group, a research based artists organisation focused on exploring the moving image, the archive, the sonic and the aural within the gallery context.
Links to work:
The Otolith Group (click on name)
“Public Assets: small-scale arts organizations and the production of value”
denise ferreira da silva
Denise Ferreira da Silva’s academic writings and artistic practice address the ethical questions of the global present and target the metaphysical and ontoepistemological dimensions of modern thought. Currently, she is Professor and Director of The Social Justice Institute (the Institute for Gender, Race, Sexuality, and Social Justice) at the University of British Columbia, Visiting Professor, School of Law, Birkbeck-University of Londonç and Adjunct Professor, Department of Fine Arts, Monash University.
Her recent academic publications include the book Toward a Global Idea of Race (University of Minnesota Press, 2007), the edited volume Race, Empire, and The Crisis of the Subprime (with Paula Chakravartty, Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013), and the articles “Nobodies: Law, Raciality, and Violence” (Griffith Law Review, 2009), “To be Announced: Radical Praxis or Knowing (at) the Limits of Justice” (Social Text, 2013), “Toward a Black Feminist Poethics: The Quest(ion) of Blackness Towards the End of the World” (The Black Scholar, 2014), and “The Racial Limits of Social Justice: The Ruse of Equality of Opportunity and the Global Affirmative Action Mandate (Critical Ethnic Studies, 2016). Her art-related work include texts for publications linked to the 2016 Liverpool and Sao Paulo Biennales, advising Natasha Ginwala, the curator for the Contour 8 Biennale (Mechelen, 2017), as well as events (performances, talks, and private sessions) and texts that part of her own practice, Poethical Readings (in collaboration with Valentina Desideri).
Links to work:
Texts available at Academia (click on link)
“The Refugee Crisis and the Racial (B)order of Global Capital”
Alyosha Goldstein
Alyosha Goldstein is associate professor of American studies at the University of New Mexico. He is the author of Poverty in Common: The Politics of Community Action during the American Century (2012), the editor of Formations of United States Colonialism (2014), and the co-editor (with Jodi A. Byrd, Jodi Melamed, and Chandan Reddy) of "Economies of Dispossession: Indigeneity, Race, Capitalism," a special issue of Social Text forthcoming in May 2018; (with Juliana Hu Pegues and Manu Vimalassery) of "On Colonial Unknowing," a special issue of Theory & Event (2016); and (with Alex Lubin) of "Settler Colonialism," a special issue of South Atlantic Quarterly (2008). His current book project is a study of the entanglements of U.S. colonialism and racial capitalism, and the economies of expendability and inclusion.
Links to work:
Poverty in Common (click on title)
“The Intimacies of Four Continents” Roundtable
laura harris
Laura Harris is Assistant Professor of Cinema Studies and Art & Public Policy. She holds a Ph.D. from New York University, an M.A. from the New School for Social Research, and a B.A. from the University of California, Berkeley.
Harris’s research interests include film, media and visual studies, hemispheric American studies, black studies, and feminist and queer studies. Her writing, which has focused on experimental aesthetic and social practices in the Americas, has appeared in Social Text, Women & Performance, Criticism and sx salon. Her first book, Experiments in Exile: C. L. R. James, Hélio Oiticica and the Aesthetic Sociality of Blackness, is forthcoming from Fordham University Press.
Before joining the faculty at NYU, Harris worked as an Assistant Professor in the Media and Cultural Studies Department at the University of California, Riverside and a Lecturing Fellow in the English Department and the Arts of the Moving Image Program at Duke University.
Links to work:
mark harris
Dr. Mark Harris is a visiting Associate Professor in the Institute of Gender, Race, Sexuality and Social Justice at the University of British Columbia. His research focuses on Indigenous rights in relation to cultural heritage, land claims, the stolen generations, intellectual property and criminal justice issues. He has worked as a lawyer giving advice on native title claims for the Wurundjeri, Gunai Kurnai, Manatunga and Gubbi Gubbi Indigenous communities in Australia and continues to provide advice to Indigenous groups on a range of issues. He has presented at international conferences around the world and has developed extensive collaborative links with other academics working with and for Indigenous communities in the USA, New Zealand, India, Africa and Brazil. As a representative of LatCrit, an NGO comprising legal academics working in the field of critical race theory and racism, he has participated in the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues.
His recent research projects have included reviews of the operation of Koori (Aboriginal) courts in Victoria (a program that is not dissimilar to Toronto’s First Nations Gladue Courts), and the experience of Koori youth in the justice system. He also works in the field of postcolonial legal theory, which informed his manuscript titled Human Rights, the Rule of Law and Exploitation in the Postcolony: Blood Minerals that will be published by Routledge later this year. He is currently an editor, along with Professor Denise Ferreira da Silva (Institute of GRSSJ, UBC) and Dr Brenna Bhandar (SOAS, London) of the Routledge series Law and the Postcolonial: Ethics, Politics and Economy.
Links to work:
Szu-Han Ho
Szu-Han Ho is an artist, writer, and Assistant Professor in the Department of Art at the University of New Mexico. Her work in sculpture, performance, installation, and writing addresses the practice of exchange in diverse collaborations and constellations. Recent projects include BORDER TO BAGHDAD, an exchange between artists from the US-Mexico border and Baghdad, Iraq; The Mirror Duet, a series of performances based on W.A.Mozart’s Der Spiegelkanons; The Internal Objects, an inner monologue in catalogue form published by Future Plan and Program; and A medida del deseo, an installation in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico.
After receiving a BA in Architecture from UC Berkeley, she launched a three-year collaborative project in art installations, speculative proposals, performance, and agricultural experimentation on a 250-acre site in West Texas. She received an MA in Visual and Critical Studies and an MFA in Film, Video, and New Media from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Szu-Han lives and works in Albuquerque, New Mexico.
Links to work:
Szu-Han Ho website (click on name)
“Shelter In Place performance excerpts at the UNM Art Museum with artist Szu-Han Ho”
Léopold Lambert
Léopold Lambert is a Paris-based architect and the editor-in-chief of The Funambulist.
Since 2007, he attempts to raise questions around the politics of the built environment in relation to the bodies. He is the author of Weaponized Architecture: The Impossibility of Innocence (dpr-barcelona, 2012), Topie Impitoyable: The Corporeal Politics of the Cloth, the Wall, and the Street (punctum, 2016) and La politique du Bulldozer: La ruine palestinienne comme projet israélien (B2, 2016).
Links to work:
The Funambulist (click on name)
“Weaponized Architecture”
simon leung
Simon Leung is an artist and Professor of Art at the Claire Trevor School of the Arts at the University of California, Irvine. In addition to teaching in the art department, Leung is an affiliate faculty member in the Critical Theory Emphasis; the Department of Asian American Studies; the Department of Gender and Sexualities Studies (Queer Studies); the Center in Law, Society and Culture; the Center for Global Peace and Conflict Studies; and the Center for Asian Studies.
Simon Leung’s foremost concern as an artist is how “the ethical,” broadly defined, can be thought and traced. His projects, in various media, include a rethinking of AIDS and otherness using the figures of the pinprick and the glory hole; meditations on “the residual space of the American/Vietnam War” (comprising works on the squatting body as counter-architecture, military desertion as askesis, and surfing); a video essay on the site/non-site dialectic instigated by Robert Smithson’s reception of Edgar Allan Poe (with a little help from Yvonne Rainer); a reconsideration of Marcel Duchamp’s oeuvre as an discourse in ethics (as seen through Étant donnés); and “squatting projects” in various cities (Berlin, New York, Chicago, Vienna, Guangzhou, Hong Kong), where the squatting body, as a heuristic cipher, is conjugated by an interpretation generated by the conditions of each location.
Leung’s more recent works include the culmination of a twenty-year collaboration with Warren Niesłuchowski in the form of two 2011 works, a site-specific project for the MAK Center for Art and Architecture in Los Angeles, called “Artist in Residence,” and a film, “War After War.” “ACTIONS!”—a performance of “art workers’ theater” inspired by the PASTA/MoMA strike of 2000, art/political protests from 1969/70, and art/activism from the recent past (including some under the auspices of Occupy Wall Street)—was presented at the Kitchen in New York in 2013. “The Side of the Mountain,” an opera project set in Los Angeles’ Griffith Park, is set for completion in 2016. Sections of the opera—“Botany and Rhetoric” (the overture, 2004); “… that this is here…” (the first act, 2005, 2006); and “Proposal for The Side of the Mountain” (the third act, 2002)—have been shown as gallery exhibitions in Europe and the US. Leung’s collaborators for the opera are the composers Luke Stoneham and Michael Webster.
Links to work:
“Simon Leung discusses War After War” (click on name)
“Displaced Bodies in Residual Spaces” (click on name)
Renisa Mawani
Renisa Mawani’s areas of research include Colonial Legal History; Critical Theory, Race and Racism; Affect; Time and Temporality; Oceans and Maritime Worlds; Indigeneity; Colonial India and the Diaspora; and Posthumanism.
Her research is organized along two trajectories.
The first meets at the interface of critical theory and legal history. To date, her work has aimed to write histories of indigenous displacement and non-European migration (from China and India, in particular) as conjoined and entangled colonial legal processes central to settler colonialism. Her first book, Colonial Proximities (2009), details legal encounters between aboriginal peoples, Chinese migrants, Europeans, and those enumerated as “mixed race” along Canada’s west coast. The book considers how state racisms are produced and mobilized through land, law, and labour in colonial sites of heterogeneity. The book critically engages Foucault’s formulation of biopolitics and state racisms.
Her current book, Across Oceans of Law, traces the mobility of law and the movements of British Indian migrants across the British Empire. Focused on the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-centuries and drawing together the Pacific, Indian, and Atlantic Oceans, this book uses oceans and time as conceptual frames to examine colonial migrations through race, globality, and indigeneity. To explore these themes historically the book focuses on the Komagata Maru‘s transoceanic journey in 1914 and the jurisdictional struggles in which it was embedded.
Her second set of interests, “legalities of nature,” coalesce at the juncture of science, law, and history. To date, she has written a series of articles on law and nature through parks and place. A central concern has been the dispossession of aboriginal peoples and the ways in which colonial violence has been effected through racial, legal, civic, and state claims to nature, identity, and wilderness. Her current research pursues the legalities of nature through philosophy and entomology to explore the appropriation of holometabolous insects as labouring bodies in contemporary geopolitics. Focused on global food production, climate change, and forms of war, this project draws from anticolonial writings and postcolonial theory and places them in conversation with the philosophy of time, movement, and change in the work Henri Bergson.
Links to work:
“In the Shadow of Gandhi: Gurdit Singh and the Sea”
robert nichols
Robert Nichols is McKnight Land-Grant Professor in Political Theory and Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Minnesota. His areas of research specialization include contemporary European philosophy and political theory (esp. Critical Theory, Marx and Marxism, Foucault); the history of political thought (esp. pertaining to imperialism and colonialism in the 19th century); and the contemporary politics of settler colonialism and indigeneity in the Anglo-American world. Before joining the University of Minnesota, Professor Nichols was Alexander von Humboldt Faculty Research Fellow in the Department of Philosophy at the Humboldt Universität zu Berlin. He has also held academic posts at the University of Alberta, University of Cambridge, and Columbia University. He is the recipient of grants and awards from the Fulbright, Humboldt, Killam, McKnight, and Trudeau Foundations, as well as from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.
Links to work:
Arjuna Neuman
Arjuna Neuman was born on an airplane, that’s why he has two passports.
He is an artist, filmmaker and writer. With recent presentations at Whitechapel Gallery, London; Istanbul Modern, Istanbul; Sharjah Biennial, UAE; Bergen Assembly, Norway; at NTU Centre for Contemporary Art, Singapore; the 56th Venice Biennale and SuperCommunity; the Haus Der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin; at KEM, Warsaw; at Ashkal Alwan and the Beirut Art Centre, Lebanon; Le Gaite Lyric, Paris; the Canadian Centre for Architecture; and the Rat School of Art, Seoul amongst others. As a writer he has published essays in Relief Press, Into the Pines Press, The Journal for New Writing, VIA Magazine, Concord, Art Voices, Flaunt, LEAP, Hearings Journal and e-flux. He also grows tomatoes and chillis in his studio.
Links to work:
Arjuna Neuman's website (click on name)
Arjuna Neuman's Vimeo page (click on name)
Rebecca Schreiber
Professor Schreiber's research focuses on issues of migration between the United States, and Mexico, and considers relations to place, identity, and dislocation through forms of visual culture.
Her most recent book The Undocumented Everyday: Migrant Lives and the Politics of Visibility examines the significance of self-representation as a strategy in documentary photography, film, video, and audio projects involving Mexican and Central American migrants in the U.S. and U.S.-Mexico borderlands during the early 21st century. She argues that by centering their subjectivity and presence in their use of documentary media, these migrants have created alternatives to liberal tropes of visibility as an abstract form of empowerment and inclusion. Instead, they use documentary media to situate their own depictions of their lives, to make public political claims, and to create forms of protection.
Her work has appeared in a special issue of Radical History Review “Calling the Law into Question: Confronting the Illegal and Illicit in Public Arenas” (Issue 113, Spring 2012), as well as a number of edited collections, including: The Latina/o Midwest Reader, edited by Claire F. Fox, Santiago Vaquera-Vásquez and Omar Valerio-Jiménez (University of Illinois Press, 2017); Remaking Reality, edited by Sara Blair, Franny Nudelman and Joseph Entin, (University of North Carolina Press, 2018); and US-Mexico Border Spaces: Visual and Cultural Environmental Histories, edited by Katherine Morrissey and John-Michael Warner (University of Arizona Press, forthcoming). In addition, her essay “The Undocumented Everyday: Migrant Rights and Performative Strategies in the work of Alex Rivera” was recently included in a special issue of the Journal of American Studies on U.S. Immigration (April 2016).
Professor Schreiber is also the author of Cold War Exiles in Mexico: U.S. Dissidents and the Culture of Critical Resistance (University of Minnesota Press, 2008). Selections from this book have been included in Imagining Our Americas: Towards a Transnational Frame (Duke University Press, 2007) edited by Sandhya Shukla and Heidi Tinsman, and Adventures into Mexico: American Tourism Beyond the Border (Rowman and Littlefield Press, Jaguar Series on Latin America, 2006) edited by Nicholas Bloom
Links to work:
“Confronting Regimes of Legality in Sanctuary City/Ciudad Santuario, 1989–2009” (click on name)
“Decolonizing Nature Conference 2017 - In the Borderlands”
Neferti Tadiar
Neferti Xina M. Tadiar joined the faculty of Barnard in 2006, after teaching in the Department of History of Consciousness at the University of California, Santa Cruz for nine years. Her academic interests include transnational and third world feminisms; postcolonial and Marxist theory; critical theories of race and subjectivity; literary and social theory; cultural studies of the Asia Pacific region; and Philippine studies.
Professor Tadiar's work examines the role of cultural practice and social imagination in the production of wealth, power, marginality, and liberatory movements in the context of global relations. Her research focuses on contemporary Philippine and Filipino cultures and their relation to political and economic change, while addressing broader issues of gender, race, and sexuality in the discourses and material practices of nationalism, transnationalism, and globalization.
Professor Tadiar is working on two book projects: Present Senses: Aesthetic Politics and Asia in the Global (with Jonathan L. Beller) and Remaindered Life: Becoming Human in a Time of War.
She is the author of Things Fall Away: Philippine Historical Experience and the Makings of Globalization (2009) and Fantasy-Production: Sexual Economies and Other Philippine Consequences for the New World Order (2004), which was awarded the Philippine National Book Award in Cultural Criticism for 2005.
Professor Tadiar is co-Editor of the international cultural studies journal, Social Text.
Links to work:
Social Text Journal (click on name)
“Accumulation of Capital and the Reemergence of Rosa Luxemburg”
