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December 19, 2022

A year-end message from 3CT’s co-directors

Dear 3CT community,

The Chicago Center for Contemporary Theory supports work that interrogates systems of power and value, that proposes methods and frameworks for making sense of recent events and ongoing transformations, and that demands that theory be relevant to the world we live in.

As we celebrate the center’s many accomplishments in 2022 and look forward to another full year of activity in 2023, we hope you’ll include us in your year-end giving. Your support has enabled us to expand our engagement with students and to make our program widely available through our website and YouTube channel, where we are now documenting as many of our events as possible.

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We’re thrilled to share a few highlights of 3CT’s recent and upcoming activity:

  • This year, we launched a new interdisciplinary project, Reimagining Cosmopolitanism, which asks, What does it mean to be a citizen of the world today? A series of international workshops—organized in partnership with the Neubauer Collegium and the University’s centers in Delhi and Paris—are bringing together contributors to the forthcoming Oxford Handbook of Cosmopolitanism, and we will also present related lectures, panel discussions, screenings, and more over the next three years.
  • We recently sent out a call for papers for the third annual Lauren Berlant 3CT Graduate Student Conference, “Power over Life and Death: Feminism, Abolition, and the State,” which will take place in Spring 2023. This student-organized conference honors longtime 3CT fellow Lauren Berlant and features students whose work fosters new forms of theorizing the contemporary world.
  • We were also thrilled to launch the new 3CT Graduate Student Fund: this year, it will support eight student proposals ranging from fieldwork and conference presentations to on-campus events.
  • Following the inaugural session of the Contemporary Critical Theory study abroad sequence in Paris in Winter 2022, applications are now open for undergraduates to participate in this 3CT-taught program when it is next offered in Winter 2024; the deadline to apply is April 21, 2023.
  • Our offering of cross-listed courses continues to grow, with five this past Fall and an additional eleven coming up in the Winter and Spring. Of note is 3CT’s annual capstone course for fourth-year undergraduates, which this year is Magical Politics, taught by William Mazzarella in Spring quarter.
  • Last but certainly not least, we presented or co-presented fourteen events this autumn, several of which are available to view on our YouTube channel. We look forward to upcoming events with Nancy Fraser, Steven Klein and Robert Meister, Darryl Li, and others—stay tuned for more details!

With gratitude and warm wishes for the holidays,

Lisa Wedeen and Kaushik Sunder Rajan
Co-directors, Chicago Center for Contemporary Theory