Events

State intervention into the economy is back on the political agenda. What might economic planning look like in the 21st century? What is the appropriate balance between democratic, technocratic, and market power in shaping economic life and responding to social and political challenges? Could economic planning help solve some of our most pressing problems, including global warming, economic stagnation, and the crisis of care? Or would a turn to planning today merely repeat the errors and tragedies of the 20th century?

This series of talks, sponsored by the Economic Planning and Democratic Politics research project at the Neubauer Collegium, aims to foster a deeper understanding of various theoretical stances on economic planning. Our speakers will draw on insights from Austrian economics, neoclassical economics, Keynesian, and democratic socialist perspectives.

Suresh Naidu is Jack Wang and Echo Ren Professor of Economics and Professor of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University. He works on political economy and historical labor markets. Naidu is interested in the economic effects of democracy and non-democracy, monopsony in labor markets, the economics of American slavery, guest worker migration, and labor unions and labor organizing.

Abstract

My lecture builds upon a quotation from Garth Fowden, “There are roads out of Antiquity that do not lead to the Renaissance,” to re-claim Antiquity as the soil from which Islamic architecture emerged. Focusing on the architecture of the Umayyads (7-8^th century), I argue that their builders engaged in a creative process that treated local classical examples as a heritage to build upon, copy, or modify in a conscious attempt to chart a new, Post-Classical architecture. The argument allows me to revisit the dominant art history paradigm that posits the West as the sole heir to the Classical Tradition and to advance another genealogy that highlights the significance of transcultural dialogue across time and place. My ultimate aim is to chart a historiographical model that integrates the art history of the Global South and other marginalized cultures everywhere in its scholarly narrative.

Bio

Nasser Rabbat is the Aga Khan Professor and the Director of the Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture at MIT. His interests include Islamic architecture, urban history, Modern Arab history, contemporary Arab art, heritage studies, and post-colonial criticism. He has published numerous articles and several books on topics ranging from Mamluk architecture to Antique Syria, 19^th century Cairo, the courtyard house, Arabism and history, and urbicide. His most recent book is Writing Egypt: Al-Maqrizi and His Historical Project (Edinburgh University Press, 2022). His co-edited book, Construction as Destruction: The Case of Syria will be published in 2024 from AUC Press. He is currently editing a book on the cultural history of Syria, tentatively entitled, Syria: The Land Where Cultures Met, and writing a history of Mamluk Cairo.

Prof. Rabbat worked as an architect in Los Angeles and Damascus and served as visiting professor at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität, Munich; École des hautes études en sciences sociales (EHESS), Paris; and New York University in Abu Dhabi. He held research fellowships in the Getty Institute in Los Angeles, the I Tatti in Florence, the Institut d’études avancées and the Institut du monde arabe in Paris, the Annemarie Schimmel Kolleg in Bonn, the American Academy in Rome, the Radcliffe Institute, Cambridge MA, the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, the Escuela de estudios arabes, Granada, the QFIS, Doha, and the American Research Center in Cairo. He contributes to several Arabic newspapers and consults with international design firms on projects in the Islamic World.

Featuring Award-Winning Japanese Writer, Kaori Fujino

April 19, 2024 - 5:00 pm

Franke Institute for the Humanities, 1100 East 57th Street Chicago, IL 60637

THIS IS AN IN-PERSON EVENT AND WILL NOT BE LIVE STREAMING.

This bilingual reading will feature the award-winning Nails and Eyes and will feature Japanese author, Kaori Fujino, and English translator Kendall Heitzman (University of Iowa). With masterful narrative control, Nails and Eyes—appearing in English for the first time—builds to a conclusion of disturbing power. Paired with two additional stories of unsettled minds and creeping tension, it introduces a daring new voice in Japanese literature. This event is co-sponsored with the Japan Foundation, New York, the University of Iowa’s Center for Asian and Pacific Studies, and the Seminary Co-op Bookstores.

Join the Chicago Center on Democracy, Chicago Studies and the Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality as we embark on a bus tour around Chicago’s most prominent women’s suffrage sites, where women gathered, organized, and fought for social change. The bus tour will cover the history of the women’s suffrage movement in Chicago by exploring landmarks related to eminent historical figures who fought for women’s voting rights, including Ida B. Wells, Fannie Barrier Williams, Elizabeth Lindsay Davis, Jane Addams, and Celia Parker Woolley, as well as more recent feminist sites, such as the “I’m Speaking” mural by Dorian Sylvain featuring Kamala Harris’ famous words.

The tour will be led by Fiona Maxwell, a PhD Candidate in the History Department who is writing her dissertation on “Democratic Ensembles: Spoken Art and Politics at Chicago Settlement Houses, 1890-1920.” Fiona received her BA in History and Theatre from Northwestern University. She has contributed to public history projects with the Jane Addams Hull-House Museum, the Center for Women’s History and Leadership, and the Newberry Library. She provides coaching in public speaking and improv, and she has performed in storytelling venues throughout the Chicago area.

This event is co-sponsored by the Chicago Center on Democracy, Chicago Studies and the Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality. 

Please RSVP; Tour includes free lunch at Greektown.

Join the University of Chicago Center for Awareness, Resolution, Education, and Support on the first floor of Regenstein Library to learn more about the work they do on campus.

Eva Vivalt, University of Toronto and University of Oxford
Topic: TBA

Thirty years of democracy in South Africa has seen large scale investments in infrastructures of housing, electricity and welfare, as well as efforts to establish new modes of local democratic participation. While political contestation is common—with the ruling party set to face its most serious challenge yet in 2024 elections— a discourse of political abandonment has also emerged, tying infrastructural failures to more general neglect by the government.

In this paper, Dubbeld will discuss these claims of abandonment, tracing this expression of political discontent to the hinterland where many in a government housing project consider themselves abandoned both by politicians and by the practice of democracy itself, which they consider abstracted from the specific care they require. This paper asks: How might a “progressive” democratic government in Global South treat those rendered a “surplus population” from the perspective of capital accumulation? To what extent should we understand this ostensible neglect as a political decision and what kinds of alternative, progressive, politics emerge? And what counter-political imaginaries arise from claims of “abandonment”?

This event is free and open to the public, and registration is recommended. Please email us at ccct@uchicago.edu if you require any accommodations to enable your full participation.

Jonathan Kolstad - University of California-Berkeley

Speaker: TBA
Topic: TBA

Brett Green, Washington University at St. Louis
Topic: TBA