Wednesday, November 5th, 2025
6–8PM
Kelly Skylight Room (9100)
CUNY Graduate Center
365 5th Avenue
Registration required.

Footprint: Four Itineraries probes the long history of the footprint’s manifestation in the human imagination. Stories of footprints testify to colonialism, imperialism, and suppression but woven through them are histories of desire, persistence, mobility, and of lightness. In taking you on a series of journeys to understand why and what it means for our future, the book asks if it is yet possible to tread lightly on our world.

Radhika Subramaniam is a curator and writer with an interdisciplinary practice. She is Associate Professor of Visual Culture at Parsons School of Design/The New School where she was also the first Director/Chief Curator of the Sheila C. Johnson Design Center from 2009-2017. She explores crises and surprises as they emerge in urban life, walking, art and human-nonhuman relationships. She is the recipient of a Culture and Animals Foundation grant, an International Visiting Curatorship at Artspace, Sydney, a SEED Foundation Teaching Fellowship in Urban Studies at the San Francisco Art Institute, and artist/writer residencies at The Banff Center, Canada and the Hambidge Center. In 2018-2019, she was a fellow at the Graduate Institute for Design, Ethnography and Social Thought. She is presently working on a book about Abu’l Abbas, a medieval elephant, purportedly gifted to emperor Charlemagne by Harun al-Rashid, caliph of Baghdad.

Kathleen Stewart writes and teaches on affect, the ordinary, the senses, and modes of ethnographic engagement based on curiosity and attachment. She is Professor Emerita of Anthropology at The University of Texas. Her first book, A Space on the Side of the Road: Cultural Poetics in an ‘Other’ America (Princeton University Press, 1996) portrays a dense and textured layering of sense and form laid down in social use. Ordinary Affects (Duke University Press, 2007) maps the force, or affects, of encounters, desires, bodily states, dream worlds, and modes of attention and distraction in the composition and suffering of present moments lived as immanent events. Her current project, Worlding, tries to approach ways of collective living through or sensing out. An attunement that is also a worlding.

Register here.

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

This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.