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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.

  • The Corporate University

    PI: 3CT Fellows

    From budget deficits to the reliance on adjunct labor, from anxieties about “woke” campus politics to worries about “cancel culture,” from the erosion of faculty governance to the empowerment of consultants and trustees, the university as an institution is being transformed.

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  • Global Capitalisms

    PI: 3CT Fellows

    Any adequate theorization of the contemporary requires an empirically attuned and theoretically sophisticated understanding of the dynamics, forms, and trajectories that global capitalism takes today.

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  • 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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  • 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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  • Revolutionary Disappointment and Recalibration

    PI: Adom Getachew, Daragh Grant, Ghenwa Hayek, Jennifer Pitts, David Scott, Lisa Wedeen

    Using theoretical, historical, and multi-sited ethnographic approaches, this project considers questions of revolution, despair, political retrenchment, nostalgia, the politics of waiting, and temporality more generally.

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Past projects

Date Project Title Principal Investigator(s)
2016–2024 Conspiracy/Theory Joseph P. Masco and Lisa Wedeen
2011–2022 Object Cultures Project Bill Brown and Shannon Lee Dawdy
2010-2021 Worlding, Writing Lauren Berlant
2017–2019 Materializing the Future Bill Brown and Shannon Lee Dawdy
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