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Events

Intellectual collaborations thrive in environments where ideas are shared, freely and respectfully, among people representing different backgrounds and perspectives. This is why the Neubauer Collegium regularly opens its inquiries and conversations to the public.

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Yesterday's Encounter

Performance

Yesterday's Encounter

This event features a staged reading of a new play by Mohammad Al Attar, directed by Gabrielle Randle-Bent.

Anas encounters Walid Salem by coincidence in Berlin. He recognizes the man’s voice; he’s never seen his face. It is the voice of the man who supervised a violent interrogation of Anas, who was blindfolded, when he was arrested in Damascus over ten years ago. Anas makes a report. Proceedings are initiated. In preparation for the trial, both men have to reconstruct what they experienced at the time and bring back what has been suppressed and forgotten.

Can a court case be built on memories of events that took place over ten years ago in a place nobody can visit now? Who is telling the truth? And is there one truth? In this new play, which is inspired by a true event, Al Attar raises questions about the different meanings of justice, and the stories of the past that are impossible to bury without confronting them first.

Born in Damascus and now living in Berlin, Mohammad Al Attar is a playwright, dramaturg, and author celebrated for his work chronicling war-torn Syria and the aftermaths of the 2011 uprisings. Al Attar is in Chicago this spring as a Neubauer Collegium Visiting Fellow, hosted by the Reimagining Cosmopolitanism project with the support of the Neubauer Collegium and 3CT. During his time here, aside from working on a new play, he will take an active part in the project’s research into what it means to be a citizen of the world today.

Presented by 3CT and the Neubauer Collegium for Culture and Society with support from the Pozen Family Center for Human Rights.

Swift Lecture Hall

This event features a staged reading of a new play by Mohammad Al Attar, directed by Gabrielle Randle-Bent.

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The Green Transition, Planning, and Democracy

Urban landscape with foliage
Conference

The Green Transition, Planning, and Democracy

What might the democratization of green investment look like?

Green industrial policy is on the rise worldwide. The United States, the European Union, and China are each using economic planning to steer their national economies toward decarbonization. In the West, this marks a remarkable departure from past decades of hands-off, market-driven policies. The conference brings together leading political theorists, social scientists, and policy experts concerned with the organizational and economic challenges that these moves toward planning pose for the democratic governance of the economy. Discussions will identify possibilities for democratization that move away from market-based solutions. What might the democratization of green investment look like? Will decarbonization-driven structural dislocation be managed technocratically and top-down, or will it be possible for the democratic community to be engaged with the management of its own recomposition? What, ultimately, does it mean to “democratically” manage conflicting pressures for environmental sustainability, economic efficiency, and decent and plentiful forms of employment in the 21st century?

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PARTICIPANTS
Aaron Benanav (Syracuse University)
Melanie Brusseler (Common Wealth)
Chiara Cordelli (University of Chicago)
Cédric Durand (University of Geneva)
Gary Herrigel (University of Chicago)
Amy Kapczynski (Yale Law School)
Michael A. McCarthy (Marquette University)
Saule Omarova (Cornell Law School)
Charlotte Robertson (Harvard Business School)


This event is sponsored by the Economic Planning and Democratic Politics research project.

Neubauer Collegium

What might the democratization of green investment look like?

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WORKS BY: Exhibition Reception

Exhibition Opening

WORKS BY: Exhibition Reception

This event celebrates an exhibition featuring works by four Chicago-based artists who share an interest in the many meanings of “labor.”

How much work does it take to make art seem effortless? Works By attempts to answer this question by bringing together four Chicago-based artists who share an interest in the many meanings of “labor.” The centerpiece of the exhibition is a floor drawing by Tony Lewis, performatively produced on site starting May 1. A sculpture by Devin T. Mays features pallets collected during his wanderings around Chicago’s South Side. Erased: (Unrelated), a 2012 photograph by Bethany Collins, captures a cloud of chalk dust released into a black void—the remnants of the word “unrelated” repeatedly written on a blackboard and then erased. A large photo by Ellen Rothenberg depicts a work boot; another captures a giant lump of crumpled paper that was once a Barbara Kruger mural. The fruits of these artists’ labors will be on view from May 1 (International Workers’ Day) through July 14 (Bastille Day)—two dates that commemorate landmark events in the history of the working class.

Neubauer Collegium

This event celebrates an exhibition featuring works by four Chicago-based artists who share an interest in the many meanings of “labor.”

Register

Preview: Projections of Panafrica

Film Screening

Preview: Projections of Panafrica

This event includes a screening of Sarah Maldoror's short film Monangambééé (1968) and a listening session with DJ Rae Chardonnay.

This event, organized as part of the Pan-Africa research project at the Neubauer Collegium, inaugurates a citywide constellation of exhibitions and events that explore Pan-Africanism in association with the Art Institute of Chicago exhibition Project a Black Planet: The Art and Culture of Panafrica. Opening in December 2024, this major exhibition is the first to survey modern and contemporary cultural activity through an expressly Pan-Africanist lens. Pan-Africanism generally evokes political action: calls for equality, self-determination, and solidarity among Black peoples worldwide. Art and culture have often been given a secondary role. Yet since its articulation in the early 20th century, Pan-Africanism has always involved rich practices of aesthetic experimentation and cultural representation. These practices continue to shape Pan-African political projects in the present.The event will begin with a screening of Monangambééé (1968), the début film by Sarah Maldoror (1929–2020), introduced by members of the Project a Black Planet curatorial team. A listening session with DJ Rae Chardonnay will explore local connections to the film, which includes music by the Art Ensemble of Chicago, and show how Pan-Africanist cultural production has emerged from Chicago and continues to circulate in this city. A discussion and reception will follow.

About the Film

Monangambééé (1968, Sarah Maldoror, 18 mins.)
Filmed in Algeria, conceived by a French filmmaker with roots in Guadeloupe and training from the Soviet Union, and centered on Portuguese torture tactics in Angola, Monangambééé epitomizes the imagination of a Black Planet forged by scrambling colonialist geographies. The title (“White Death!”) was a warning from the days of enslavement repurposed by Angolan activists as a rallying cry. This is the first film by Maldoror, a Parisian theater director turned cinema auteur, who took her art name from the proto-Surrealist classic The Songs of Maldoror, and used free-jazz experiments by the Art Ensemble of Chicago as the soundtrack to this short-form paean to revolutionary action. As Maldoror sharply proclaimed, “I feel at home wherever I am. I am from everywhere and from nowhere.”

Presented by the Neubauer Collegium for Culture and Society in partnership with the Art Institute of Chicago, the Chicago Humanities Festival, and Arts + Public Life.

Green Line Performing Arts Center

This event includes a screening of Sarah Maldoror's short film Monangambééé (1968) and a listening session with DJ Rae Chardonnay.

Register