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Housing Imaginaries

A small sculpture rests on an off-white background. The piece by Beverly Buchanan is a diorama-like house with a chimney, open front door, enclosed back porch, and short stilts.

Housing Imaginaries

What is the role of imagination in addressing the contemporary housing crisis? Through a combination of archival research, field interviews, and collaborative workshops, this project will integrate creative and humanistic modes of thinking into social scientific research on Chicago housing. The aim is to inform both academic and public discourse on a crucial policy issue.

The housing crisis looms large across the contemporary United States and the city of Chicago. Our interdisciplinary and multi-method project centers the role of imagination in addressing the crisis, asking how housing is imagined and how imagination might be a crucial tool for confronting the housing crisis. We will draw on conversations, interviews, and cultural archives to organize and illuminate the housing imaginaries of housing practitioners, advocates, dreamers, and residents, past and present. The project will culminate in academic and public-facing publications as well as a public convening. By uncovering and disseminating housing imaginaries, this project promises to push beyond an impasse among social scientists, who are hindered by their focus on critique, and a trepidation among humanities scholars to engage with contemporary social issues. Overall, our project will advance scholarship and advocacy on housing but also demonstrate the intellectual and civic value of collaborative, cross-disciplinary research at the nexus of culture and society.

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Panafrica: Histories, Aesthetics, Politics

A Kerry James Marshall sculpture depicting Africa

Panafrica: Histories, Aesthetics, Politics

A series of discussions will explore the links between Pan-African politics and cultural production.

In the view of this project’s leaders, Pan-Africanism articulates a universality comparable in its reach to Marxism. It has guided independence movements and anticolonial struggles in dozens of countries around the world where the majority of inhabitants are of African descent; it has shaped the terms of advocacy and protest in many more countries where they are not. Pan-Africanism has been as influential for intellectual history as psychoanalysis or post-structuralism, and it has lent heft to such internationally popular artistic and religious forms as reggae, Nollywood movies, and Candomblé. Yet Pan-Africanism is elusive in its manifold meanings; its appeal seems, moreover, always to be fading in one place while ascending elsewhere. Above all, Pan-Africanism is predominantly understood as a political movement—a call for equality, self-determination, and solidarity among Black peoples. What is the relation of that political cause to cultural production and to the humanities? This project will hold a series of seven convenings structured to explore a given location and private or institutional archives held there. The first will take place in Chicago and the rest will follow in a variety of international destinations. This interdisciplinary undertaking is conceived as an indispensable complement to a major loan exhibition on Pan-Africanist art and culture planned as the Art Institute of Chicago’s premier exhibition for fall 2024.

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Scholasticide in and Beyond Palestine

A soldier sits in a chair reading while books burn behind him.

Scholasticide in and Beyond Palestine

Bringing together an interdisciplinary team of scholars, this project will use a mixed-methods approach in undertaking empirical research and comparative analysis to investigate “scholasticide” as a critical category for political and historical analysis. In addition to the resident research team, the project will involve a sequence of virtual visiting fellows.

Since October 2023, all twelve of Gaza’s universities have been destroyed, and hundreds of university students and dozens of academic and university staff have been killed. This destruction amounts to what scholars have called “scholasticide,” part of a concerted attack on collective life and social regeneration in Palestine. Building on a pilot documentation project at the University of Chicago, Scholasticide in and Beyond Palestine is a two-year collaboration bringing together scholars from the US, Palestine, and the UK to collect and analyze data on the history of Palestinian higher education in the Gaza Strip and the many dimensions of the recent phases of scholasticide. The project will also engage in theoretical development of the scholasticide concept through a comparative approach to attacks on education and social regeneration under settler/racial regimes, especially among Black and Indigenous communities in North America.

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