Past Events

2022-23 Interseminars Events

The Mellon-funded Interseminars Initiative’s inaugural cohort, “Imagining Otherwise: Speculation in the Americas,” hosted a series of public events both online and in-person during academic year 2022–23.

Lin Hixson and Matthew Goulish

Lin Hixson and Matthew Goulish, co-founders of the Chicago-based performance company Every house has a door, spoke about speculative practice and futuristic ways of imagining how we create.

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Eve L. Ewing

Public scholar Eve L. Ewing (University of Chicago) used multi-generational storytelling to inquire about—and interrogate—racialized histories and imagine emancipatory possibilities grounded in joy and liberation. She gave a talk over Zoom titled “The Afrofuturist Dialogues and Other Speculations.”

Amber Johnson

Amber Johnson (Saint Louis University) discussed methods for conjuring the world and communities in which we want to live and thrive, empowering scholars from various disciplines to contemplate an imaginative approach to scholarship and publishing.

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Macarena Gómez-Barris

Macarena Gómez-Barris (Brown University) spoke about her Atacama [Desert] Integrated Research Practice. She reflected on how writing, research, and creative practice come together as a palimpsest of approaches and how we might rethink the role of the human and nonhuman in the desert given the colonial anthropocene, and the context of ongoing environmental damage, ruin, and extractivism.

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David Shrobe

Artist David Shrobe (Hunter College) spoke on “Imagination, Materiality, and Narrative as Liberatory Modes of Intervention,” asking questions about identity, history, and memory through an exploration of his multi-layered portraits and assemblage paintings.

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Culminating Symposium

Finally, the cohort planned and hosted a two-day culminating symposium. Read more about the symposium