The Center for Place, Culture, and Politics advances scholarship and fosters dialogue to understand, critique, and challenge racial capitalism.

2025–2026 Seminar Theme

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?