Julian Gantt

Program Manager

Julian GanttĀ is the program manager for the Center for Place, Culture, and Politics. He is a PhD candidate in anthropology at the CUNY Graduate Center and will defend a dissertation in February 2027 that traces the intertwined histories of colonialism, labor struggle, endangered species, and mass incarceration through coastal forests in the US Pacific Northwest. Previously, he worked for SEIU 32BJ in New York City and SEIU Healthcare 1199NW in Seattle, where he was a staff organizer, assisting workers to form unions and win contract campaigns. In Seattle, he cofounded a community organization to stand in solidarity with asylum seekers.




Participating Years


2026–2027

Radical Imagination: Temporalities and Geographies of Struggle

In a world of deepening crises, of socioeconomic inequities, of environmental collapse, of resurgent fascism and institutionalized authoritarianism, what is the place of radical imagination in creating more just worlds? While some think of the work of imagination as being outside of—at a distance to, or even in a different temporality than—everyday struggle, we want to shine a light on the work of radical practice as a form of imagination. We look to anticapitalist and antiracist organizing and thought, and the complex practices in time and place through which change is not only presented and represented but produced.
2025–2026

Mobility: Transit and Transformation

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 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.
2024–2025

Anti-Capitalist Environmentalism

The existential problems of the planet are complex. Given capitalism’s obsessive growth primed by, for instance, land-grabbing, extractivism, social and economic hierarchies, and war, capitalist environmentalism leansĀ heavily onĀ tweaking armageddon to maintain its hold on futurity for the planet.