Annual Theme

CHR Annual Themes

CHR Annual Theme 2025-26: Space, Territory, and Mobility 


Considerations of space, territory, and mobility--in their material, institutional, and sociocultural dimensions and in their discursive, representational, and conceptual dimensions--have long been central to humanistic inquiry. Concepts of space and place are embedded in cultural narratives and discourses that shape our understanding of who belongs and who is considered an outsider, our ideas of possession and dispossession, our conception of social and cultural heartlands and frontiers. The demarcation of territories, be it through physical borders, urban zoning, digital fences, or cultural boundaries, reflects and shapes political power, social inequality, and access to resources. And the dynamics of mobility—whether through migration, war, or conflict; the transformation of neighborhoods and communities; or the movement of capital, information, culture and goods across regions and in a globalized world—reveal both networks of connection and forms of exclusion and displacement.

We interpret the theme of “Space, Territory, and Mobility” broadly and aim to foster humanistic inquiry across multiple disciplines. Possible topics include, but are not limited to: discourses of nation and region; movements of refugees, exiles, and displaced populations; flows of people, capital, or culture between country and city, metropole and colony, or along other circuits or gradients; the history, ethics, and politics of borders; the locality and dissemination of languages, religions, and cultural practices; found, engineered, and imagined utopias; the negotiation of disability and mobility in the built environment; indigenous, decolonial, or anti-racist critiques of property, segregation, and exclusion; the role of routes, networks, and nodes in the diffusion and hybridization of cultural practices; environmental transformation, degradation, or repair; the spatial dynamics of detention and incarceration; digital landscapes as spaces of connection and control; passages between the worldly and otherworldly; the character and significance of borderlands, diasporas, and ecumenes; disciplinary practices that define themselves in terms of “areas” (geographical or spatial domains or foci) or of “movements” (of texts, discourses, artifacts, Ideologies, as well as of peoples, goods, technologies, institutions).  

Annual Theme 2024-25: humanity and its others

In a world increasingly hostile both to the humanities and to the maintenance and flourishing of humanity, this year's annual theme calls for critical engagements, across different periods, places, and disciplines, with the qualities and category of "humanity" and with the borders, limits, doubles, analogues, antitheses, and "others" of these things.  
 
Humanity has been imagined both as a quality intrinsic to human beings and as an acquired characteristic, something that must be cultivated and nurtured, an ideal toward which humans strive. Though at times conceived in relation to what transcends it (gods, heroes, superhumans), a sense of the value of humanness has led to critiques of human degradation, that is, of dehumanization, of subhuman subordination, of "crimes against humanity."  
 
Some thinkers have elevated humanity over other forms of being, giving rise to doctrines of exceptionalism, extractivism, and imperialism. Moreover, the classification of humans on the basis of religion, race, nation, gender, class, education, intelligence, neurodiversity, criminality, morality, talent, beauty, and other normative qualities has often imposed hierarchies of humanness. Other thinkers have sought to dissolve the boundaries between humanity and its others and to examine the entanglement of humans with non-human "nature,” supernatural/superhuman beings, and manifestations of the divine.  
 
More recently, the impending possibility of artificial general intelligence, alongside advances in genetic engineering and robotics and the pressures of anthropogenic climate change, raises new questions about the future of humanity. What kinds of transhuman or posthuman, hybrid, collaborative or competitive possibilities are there for humans? Is “humanity” a concept and a value that we wish to discard or to protect?   
 
During this academic year, we will engage with projects that interrogate, decenter, redefine, or traverse the boundaries between humanity and its “others” -- that investigate and analyze how humanity has been conceived and contested, how it has been nurtured and sustained or deformed and denied, how it has served as an essential value or as an evaluative yardstick, how it has helped to construct worlds that are hospitable or inhuman.