Mobility: Transit and Transformation

CPCP Seminar Theme for 2025-2026

Crises of mobility have become a key integer of social struggle in the world system. Whether one considers the explosion of different forms of movement—and the unending state efforts to classify them as deserving or undeserving, as economic, environmental, or asylum-based—or the production of immobility, in carcerality, wagelessness, enclosure, or via the securitization of borders, mobility and its discontents are central to radical activism across local and transnational communities. How do shifts in forms of mobility inform or mediate the conditions of social change? What are the links between transit and transition? Do contemporary logics of mobility, at different scales, temporalities and intensities, represent counter-hegemonic realms of possibility, political imagination, and new ways to think and express transformation?

For the 2025-2026 seminar, CPCP invites applicants to examine mobility and immobility from a wide variety of interdisciplinary approaches. What are the relevant conditions of material change for organizers and scholars? How should we understand mobility: as a way to rethink political economy, as the inevitable undoing of the nation-state, as an ontological condition? What methodologies are adequate to understanding the movement (or not) of people across the planet, and what happens when we broaden the frame to include the things that people move with and against: commodities, capital, viruses, racialized infrastructures, ecologies, abolition imaginaries and practices? The seminar will explore the possible parameters of praxis and the production of knowledge that attends them. How can mobility itself be mobilized?

More information about the seminar fellowships can be found here.

To apply for the Graduate Center Dissertation Fellowship, follow these instructions.

To apply as candidates for CUNY Faculty Fellows, follow these instructions.

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Tuesday, October 15, 2024
6pm-8pm
Room 9205-9206
CUNY Graduate Center
365 5th Avenue

Has war become the main feature of Israel’s military occupation of 1967? Reckoning with the tragic features of Israel’s unprecedented war on Gaza –triggered by Hamas’s 7 October 2023 attacks – this talk asks what this new conjuncture means for occupied Palestinians and the question of Palestine. Has justice been rolled back for another generation – or is there new hope?

Bashir Abu-Manneh is Reader in Postcolonial Literature in the School of Classics, English, and History, University of Kent (UK), and has served as Head of School from 2021 to 2024. He is author of The Palestinian Novel: From 1948 to the Present (2016) and Fiction of the New Statesman, 1913–1939 (2011). He has also edited a collection of articles on Edward Said entitled After Said: Postcolonial Literary Studies in the Twenty-First Century (2018). He writes regularly on Israel-Palestine for Jacobin magazine.

Marc Lamont Hill is a Presidential Professor of Urban Education and Anthropology at the CUNY Graduate Center. He is a cultural anthropologist, critical policy scholar, and radical educator whose work explores issues of race, education, citizenship, and state violence in the United States and Middle East. Hill is the author of seven books, including Except for Palestine: The Limits of Progressive Politics. He is also the host of UpFront on Al Jazeera English.

This event is sponsored by the Center for Place, Culture and Politics. It is free and open to the public

Tuesday September 24
6:00pm-7:30pm ET
Register for the Webinar on Zoom or In-PersonSpeakers: Members of TIAA Exposed from Phillips County Arkansas
Introduction: Doug Hertzler, Stop Land Grabs Campaign, ActionAid USA
Moderator: Abigayle Reese, TIAA-Divest

This event is co-sponsored by the Center for Place, Culture and Politics. It is free and open to the public.
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THURSDAY SEPTEMBER 5th
6:30PM
ELEBASH RECITAL HALL
365 FIFTH AVENUE
REGISTER HERE

The passage of the Build Public Renewables Act (BPRA) unleashed the potential of the New York Power Authority (NYPA) to dramatically expand renewable energy production and energy conservation, and the NYPA has promised to publish its plans in January 2025. However, we must push them to include a robust plan to decarbonize CUNY and other public buildings. Fighting climate change isn’t just about saving the planet—it’s also an opportunity to make our air and water cleaner, save us money, prevent blackouts, and create high-quality union jobs.

CUNY is in a unique position to be both a hub and a model for large public decarbonization efforts, and this Town Hall is a step toward building the public support and partnerships needed to build the clean energy future we deserve.

Hosted by the Professional Staff Congress of CUNY, the Center for the Humanities, and the Ecocriticism Working Group on Thursday, September 5th, 6:30 pm at the CUNY Graduate Center, join faculty, students, staff, environmental organizations, community leaders, and union members for a discussion with an array of people working to create a healthy, sustainable, and fossil-free future, both at CUNY and across the nation. We will discuss how CUNY can be the leader in the green energy transition by demanding the state and NYPA take action now.

This event is co-sponsored by the Center for Place, Culture and Politics. It is free and open to the public.

Tuesday, May 21, 6:30PM
The People’s Forum 320 West 37^th Street

Resisting Borders and Technologies of Violence

REGISTER HERE

LIVESTREAM via this link

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