Interseminars Event Series

FALL 2023 EVENTS

Through the Mellon-funded Interseminars Initiative, faculty and graduate students collaborate in the design of cross-departmental and cross-college courses, with funding for key aspects of that work: co-curricular programming, shared research experiences, and fellowship support for students.

The inaugural Interseminars cohort— “Imagining Otherwise: Speculation in the Americas— presented a Culminating Symposium September 15–16, 2023. Read more and see the full schedule!

The second cohort—“Improvise and Intervene”—is proud to present a speaker series this academic year. Details follow below.

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Weds., October 18, 7:30 p.m. Central

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Tara Willis sitting on a bright yellow-green chair and Damon Locks Djing

Step step step: improvisation, sound, and movement

Presented by Damon Locks (artist, educator, musician) and Tara Aisha Willis, PhD (artist, curator, lecturer, at University of Chicago).

Location: Levis Faculty Center, Room 300

Weds., November 8, 7:00 p.m. Central

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Black and white photo of Courtney Morris standing in front of a brick wall

Marxists and Priestesses

Presented by Courtney Morris (Gender and Women’s Studies, University of California, Berkeley).

Location: Levis Faculty Center, Room 210

Weds., December 6, 6:00 p.m. Central

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Dylan Rodríguez standing outdoors in front of greenery

Against the Counterinsurgency Machine

Presented by Dylan Rodríguez (Black Study and Media and Cultural Studies, University of California, Riverside)

Defying some recent academic, philanthropic, nonprofit, and state-crafting expropriations and rebranding of “abolition” as funding stream, career path, and voluntaristic public-facing identity, to take the creative-destructive imperative of abolition seriously may mean losing and/or severing organizational, epistemic, and ideological attachments to the guarantees of (certain kinds of) sociality and order that are inscribed on both institutions and “our” own varied attachments to institutionality (from state and sexuality to citizenship and subjectivity). Lingering in the abolition imperative, there is a persistent and endless collectively reimagined objective, that is, a mirage or collective dream of something on the other side of tyranny and terror, a something that slips and escapes definitive description even as it must actively be saturated with insurgent people’s audacious, wild, autonomous imaginations.

Dylan Rodríguez is a teacher, scholar, organizer and collaborator who has maintained a day job as a Professor at the University of California-Riverside since 2001.

Location: Levis Faculty Center, Room 210