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Led by 3CT fellows, these multi-year thematic projects enable conversation and collaboration across disciplines on contemporary problems and current issues in contemporary theory.

  • Reimagining Cosmopolitanism

    PI: Dipesh Chakrabarty and Lisa Wedeen

    What does it mean to be a citizen of the world today? This project aims to creatively and critically theorize new forms, sites, and manifestations of cosmopolitanism and to develop a new set of conceptual tools and categories.

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  • New Global Authoritarianisms

    PI: Andreas Glaeser and Lisa Wedeen

    This project facilitates ongoing conversations on the fate of liberal democracy, attending to the role that new authoritarianisms are playing in reversing the global trend towards inclusive and democratic forms of government.

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  • Conspiracy/Theory

    PI: Joseph P. Masco and Lisa Wedeen

    Understanding the elective affinities between conspiracy and theory while appreciating the seductions of each, this project grapples with the ways in which suspicion, opacity, networks, uncertainty, and mass mediation function today.

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  • Materializing the Future

    PI: Bill Brown and Shannon Lee Dawdy

    How is the future being shaped by designers in the present? Having passed through a period of postmodern disenchantment, designers now seem ready again to take on the challenge of the future.

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  • Object Cultures Project

    PI: Bill Brown and Shannon Lee Dawdy

    Most generally the task of this module is to formulate new ways of understanding how people transform the physical object world and how that world in turn transforms them. We are concerned with the mutual constitution of subject and object, the animate and inanimate, person and thing, and with the ways objects mediate individual and group identities.

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  • Global Crowds

    PI: William Mazzarella

    This project explores the resurgence of crowds across the world today: what can a close and comparative exploration of crowds around the world tell us about the very substance of contemporary politics?

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Past projects

Date Project Title Principal Investigator(s)
2010-2021 Worlding, Writing Lauren Berlant
2014-2019 History, Social Theory, and Capitalism Moishe Postone & William H. Sewell, Jr.
2014–2016 Neoliberalism + Empire Lisa Wedeen
2011–2014 Climate Change Dipesh Chakrabarty
2012–2014 Generational Change Lisa Wedeen and Hussein Agrama
2014 Public, Life William Mazzarella
Series