3CT faculty and associates have pursued several ongoing projects since the Center’s creation in 2004.  During 2007-08, 3CT will inaugurate two new projects, one on Aesthetics & Politics, and the other on the ways in which global neoliberalism is transforming the world’s states.

The Chicago Studies in Practices of Meaning book series with the University of Chicago Press seeks to develop an audience for interdisciplinary work combining serious theoretical reflection with empirically rich accounts of local experience. It is not only a book series but also a seminar series; each year, several prospective authors are invited to the Center to discuss their manuscripts with the editors (Jean Comaroff, Lisa Wedeen, William Sewell, and Andreas Glaeser) and other Faculty Fellows and Associates of the Center. To date, the series has published five titles and has several more on the way.

Faculty participants in the Object Cultures Project, organized by Bill Brown, formulate and confront new questions about how people transform the physical object world, and about how that world, in turn, transforms them. One of the project’s central premises is that the object relations from distinct cultures can shed new light on cultural distinction as such, as on cultural transactions, past and present.

The Center is now the Chicago home of the Social Theory Group, a network of scholars primarily from the University of Chicago, Northwestern, the University of Michigan, the New School University, and New York University, who have been meeting regularly in Chicago for several years; its discussions, focused mainly on large-scale historical transformations of the contemporary world, have ranged over problems of democratization, socioeconomic globalization, and empire.