Mary N. Taylor

Former Assistant Director

Mary N. Taylor was the Assistant Director of the CPCP for several years and a founding member of the LeftEast collective. Working at the intersection of anthropology, urbanism, and dialogical art, her praxis investigates sites, techniques, and politics of civic cultivation, the production of political personhood, the ethics and aesthetics of nationalism/cultural differentiation, and the history of communist experiment. Dr. Taylor’s work has appeared in numerous journals. She co-edited Co-revolutionary Praxis: Accompaniment as a Strategy for Working Together (Auckland: St. Paul St. Gallery, 2015) and The Commonist Horizon: Futures Beyond Capitalist Urbanization (Common Notions, 2023). Her historical ethnography, Movement of the People: Folk Dance, Populism, and Citizenship in Hungary (2021 Indiana University Press), explores the tension between peoples’ movements and populism in Hungary through the lens of a folk revival movement. She is currently working on a dialogical film project about liberation movement lives in the former socialist bloc.

Connected Events

The Cultural Politics of Authoritarian Statism in Hungary

December 4, 2023

Ñai’ũpo Rape: A Dialogue of Ancestral Ethnoknowledge

March 11, 2024

Global Scholars Dialogue with the University of Rojava

October 24, 2023

Participating Years

2023–2024

The State. Abolitionist? Fascist? Communist? Bourgeois?

In imagining and forging the future, there is much talk of the state, but often with little detail.  What should public goods consist of, and how might they be organized? Can the need for coercion (e.g., to pay taxes for public goods) be realized without the carceral and its underlying apparatuses of organized violence? What forms of sovereignty and its delegation (above or below) are possible and desirable?
2022–2023

Revolutionary Arts

Wary of making politics an aesthetic in disguise, radical theory and practice have nevertheless embraced all kinds of artistic provocations and traditions in every form and genre. At the same time, the possibility for fundamental change demands a range of interpretive encounters that might elicit meanings for people whom Julius Scott, writing about a different time, described as “disenchanted people casting about for new options.”
2021–2022

Agrarian Questions, Urban Connections, and Planetary Possibilities: Fire, Water, Earth and Air

The material conditions of agrarian life are deeply connected to the political, social, economic, environmental and cultural challenges of contemporary existence at a planetary scale. Agrarian spaces are central to geopolitical disputes over land and other natural resources, and rural social movements play a key role in defending biodiversity and food production.
2020–2021

The Agrarian Question Today

In the context of what appears to be inexorable urbanization, it is just as clear that agrarian questions are deeply enmeshed in the political, social, economic, and cultural challenges of contemporary existence. How have newer regimes of capital, particularly those associated with agri-business and food conglomerates, both formed and fractured agricultural communities?
2019–2020

Mobilizations and Migrations

However the international order is characterized, it is clear that various forms of internationalism are in distress.  These are at work both in producing violent conflagration and in generating moving populations across the globe (migrant labor, refugees, asylum seekers, exiles, emigres, etc.).  How, then, can internationalism be thought and articulated anew?