Radical Imagination: Temporalities and Geographies of Struggle – 2026 CPCP Annual Conference

Vijay Iyer has carved out a unique path as an influential, prolific, shape-shifting presence in twenty-first-century music. A composer and pianist active and revered across multiple musical communities, Iyer has created a consistently innovative, emotionally resonant body of work over the last three decades, earning him a place as one of the leading music-makers of his generation. His honors include a MacArthur Fellowship, a Doris Duke Performing Artist Award, a United States Artist Fellowship, three Grammy nominations, and the Alpert Award in the Arts. His newest albums are Defiant Life (ECM, 2025), his second suite of duets with visionary composer-trumpeter Wadada Leo Smith; Compassion (ECM, 2024), featuring his celebrated trio with drummer Tyshawn Sorey and bassist Linda May Han Oh; Thereupon (Pi Recordings, 2025), the long-awaited return of an all-star collective comprising Iyer, Sorey, and saxophonist Steve Lehman; Trouble (BMOP/sound, 2024), a composer portrait album comprising three of his orchestral works, including the titular violin concerto performed by Jennifer Koh; and Love in Exile (Verve, 2023), his Grammy-nominated collaboration with Arooj Aftab and Shahzad Ismaily. The New York Times observed, “Iyer’s music has always been both intelligent and unpretentious, complex without being opaque; [he] ponders a phrase with obsessive rumination, unveiling layers of shifting, subtle emotion, before letting it fly with joyous abandon.” He is a professor at Harvard University. Photo by Ebru Yildiz.

Eman Abdelhadi is an academic, activist, and artist based in Chicago, IL. Her research as faculty at the University of Chicago focuses on gender differences in the community trajectories of Muslim Americans. Abdelhadi has also spent many years organizing. She has been involved in the movement for Palestinian liberation, Black Lives Matter, counter-surveillance and abolitionism, Marxist feminist mobilization, as well as workplace struggles. She is currently co-coordinating the Muslim Alliance for Gender and Sexual Diversity, a national organization that provides support and builds community by and for Queer Muslims. Abdelhadi maintains an active creative practice that includes performance art and essay and poetry writing. Her writing has appeared in Jacobin, Muftah, and other publications. She is coauthor of Everything for Everyone: An Oral History of the New York Commune, 2052–2072.

Yasmine Batniji is a Palestinian American artist born in Florida, specializing in video game art and digital preservation. Batniji holds an MFA from the NYU Game Center and focuses on archiving and recreating Palestinian landmarks and cultural artifacts through 3D modeling and scanning. Their work bridges history and digital worlds, creating immersive video game experiences that preserve and reimagine narratives of Palestinian heritage. By situating these preserved sites within interactive spaces, Batniji offers new perspectives on cultural memory, resilience, and the imagined futures of Palestine. They are the designer of Pomegranates, a game that memorializes Palestinian lives and landmarks lost since October 7, 2024.

Ghazal Ghazi is a poet and visual artist whose life has spanned three distinct regions: the Middle East, the US, and South America. Through oil paintings and ceramics, she speaks both to and from peripheries of power, empire, and belonging as she addresses collective memory and archival silences. She was a semifinalist in the National Portrait Gallery’s Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition 2022 at the Smithsonian Institution, as well as a 2022 Junior Fellow at the Library of Congress. She is currently an artist in residence at BRIC Arts Media in Brooklyn, New York. Her books include La frontera desemboca en ti (Cafeína Editores: Guatemala, 2019) and El ancestro del poema es la herida (Ginecosofia: Chile, 2024). Photo by Hannah Crickman.

Stephanie Luce is Professor of Labor Studies at the School of Labor and Urban Studies, and Professor of Sociology at the Graduate Center, City University of New York (CUNY). She received her BA in economics at the University of California, Davis and both her PhD in sociology and her MA in industrial relations from the University of Wisconsin at Madison. Best known for her research on living wage campaigns and movements, she is the author of Fighting for a Living Wage, and co-author of The Living Wage: Building a Fair Economy, and The Measure of Fairness. She is also author of Labor Movements: Global Perspectives. Her latest book, co-authored with Deepak Bhargava, is Practical Radicals: Seven Strategies to Change the World.

M. Murphy is a technoscience studies scholar who theorizes and researches about environmental justice, reproductive justice, Indigenous science and technology studies, infrastructures and data studies, racial capitalism, and the Great Lakes. Murphy is the Tier 1 Canada Research Chair in Science and Technology Studies and Environmental Data Justice and are jointly appointed to the School of Environment. They are also Co-Director of the Technoscience Research Unit, which is a home for social justice, Indigenous, and decolonial approaches to Science and Technology Studies, as well as a Indigenous Environmental Data Justice lab. Their current research focuseson the relationships between pollution, chemicals, colonialism, data, and altered life on the Great Lakes. They are a lead PI at the Acceleration Consortium where they direct a lab on Indigenous science and Ethical Substance. They are the author of three books, The Economization of Life, Seizing the Means of Reproduction, and Sick Building Syndrome and the Politics of Uncertainty, as well as a coauthor of Fear of a Dead White Planet, all with Duke University Press. They are Red River Métis from Winnipeg.

M. E. O’Brien writes on gender freedom and communist theory. She co-edits two magazines: Pinko, on gay communism, and Parapraxis, on psychoanalytic theory and politics. Her work on family abolition has been translated into Chinese, German, Greek, French, Spanish, and Turkish. Previously, she coordinated the New York City Trans Oral History Project and worked in HIV and AIDS activism and services. She completed a PhD at New York University, where she wrote on how capitalism shaped New York City LGBTQ social movements. She is currently in training to be a psychoanalyst and works as a therapist. She is coauthor of Everything for Everyone: An Oral History of the New York Commune, 2052–2072

Marisa Solomon is an Assistant Professor of Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies at Barnard College, Columbia University, where she teaches courses in feminist intersectional science studies, environmental humanities, Black geographies, feminist theory, and queer of color critique. Her new book, The Elsewhere is Black: Ecological Violence and Improvised Life (Duke University Press 2025), which received Duke University Press’s Scholar of Color First Book Award, considers ecological politics from the position of Black dispossession. Attentive to the way that anti-Blackness is a land-use strategy of settler colonialism in the U.S., her work focuses on how Black improvisation with waste’s form and meaning re-member what counts as ecological politics. She has written a number of articles on the relationship between waste and Black life in the US, including, “The Ghetto is a Gold Mine” for the Journal of Labor and Working-Class History and “Ecologies Elsewhere” for GLQ: A Journal of Gay and Lesbian Studies and “Living with Harm” forthcoming for Scholar and Feminist Online. Her work also appears in a number of edited volumes such as, Waste as Critique (Oxford University Press), Black Environmentalisms (forthcoming with Duke University Press) and The Politics of Disposability (forthcoming with Duke University Press). One of her essays, “The Edge of the Usual,” also appears in a compilation of essays for the 2023-2024 Venice Biennial on Everlasting Plastics. She is currently the director of Barnard’s Interdisciplinary Race and Ethnic Studies Minor, an editorial board member of Women’s Studies Quarterly (WSQ) and Scholar and Feminist Online as well as the former co-director of the Black Atlantic Ecologies project at the Columbia Center for the Study of Social Difference, where she was affiliated with the Earth Institute.

Neferti Xina M. Tadiar is Professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Barnard College. She is the author of Remaindered Life (Duke University Press, 2022), a meditation on the disposability and surplus of life-making under contemporary conditions of the global empire of capital which won the John Hope Franklin Book for Best Book in American Studies in 2023, and Life-Times of Becoming-Human (Everything’s Fine Press, 2022), which won the Philippine National Book Award in Philosophy in 2024. Professor Tadiar is also 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. She is also co-editor of Beyond the Frame: Women of Color and Visual Representation (with Angela Y. Davis). Her most recent books are Discourse on Imperialism (University of the Philippines Press, 2025) and At the Edges of Command: Conversations and Reflections on Remaindered Life (Gantala Press, 2026).