Miriam Ticktin

Director

Miriam TicktinĀ is Director of CPCP and Professor of Anthropology at the CUNY (City University of New York) Graduate Center. She has held positions at the New School for Social Research, University of Michigan, and at Columbia University, and she has been a fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, the Russell Sage Foundation in New York City, and an invited visiting professor at the EHESS in Paris. She publishes widely on topics such as migration, borders, humanitarianism, and racial and gendered inequalities, and most recently, she has written about the idea of a decolonial feminist commons. She is the author ofĀ Casualties of Care: Immigration and the Politics of Humanitarianism in FranceĀ (University of California Press, 2012), and co-editor ofĀ In the Name of Humanity: The Government of Threat and CareĀ (Duke University Press, 2010). Her latest book is Against Innocence: Undoing and Remaking the World (University of Chicago Press, 2025). She is currently working on her next book,Ā Containment and Commoning: From Bordered Worlds to Collective Life. Ticktin writes in public venues such as Truthout, LARB and Open Democracy, and organizes with migrant social justice groups in the US and in France.


Collected Work


Against Innocence: Undoing and Remaking the World

In this book, Miriam Ticktin explores how a concept that consistently appears as a moral good actually ends up creating harm for so many. Ticktin shows how innocence structures political relationships, focusing on individual victims and saviors, while foreclosing forms of collective responsibility. Ultimately, she wants to understand what makes the discourse around innocence so powerful and compelling, while showing that alternative political forms already exist.




Participating Years


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.
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 ā€œdisenchanted people casting about for new options.ā€