CHR Second Annual Symposium, Connecting/Not Connecting (April 27-28, 2023)

April 27, 2023, 6:00 PM to April 28, 2023, 4:00 PM EDT

Be sure to register for more information and updates about the conference!

CHR's second annual research symposium will begin on Thursday evening, April 27 followed by a day of panels on Friday, April 28. The conference revolves around our annual theme of connecting/not connecting. 

The idea of connection has multiple valences, critical and utopian, historical and contemporaneous, for the humanities. Connection might imply “community,” which at once signals voluntary affiliation and its opposite: forms of exclusion and non-belonging. “Community” can empower people through forms of social and political solidarity, it can serve as a foundation for people’s sense of belonging, and identity, but it can also compel conformity, defined by antipathies and cleavages, or as naturalized, obligatory belonging. Notions of communal or collective responsibility can serve as the basis for recognition of structural ills and their redress, but they can also become the basis for group stigmatization. Communities can be undone through acts of violence, through ideological provocation, or through the struggle over territory. Equally, they can be undone by the slow attrition wrought by social-economic forces (such as gentrification, the passing-away of unions, the loss of jobs or the demands of new forms of labor), by environmental and demographic developments, the emergence of a disease, the impact of climate change. Might there be alternatives to “community”, new imaginative forms of working, organizing, or living together?

We are thrilled to announce that our keynote speaker is Professor Seyla Benhabib! Dr. Benhabib is the Eugene Meyer Professor of Political Science and Philosophy Emerita at Yale University, where she taught from 2001-2022. She is currently Scholar in Residence at Columbia Law School and Professor Adjunct of Law, where she teaches legal and political theory as well as a course on refugee, migration and citizenship law in comparative perspective. She also holds appointments in Columbia University’s Center for Contemporary Critical Thought and the Department of Philosophy. Professor Benhabib is the recipient of the Ernst Bloch prize (2009), the Leopold Lucas Prize (2012), and the Meister Eckhart Prize (2014), a Guggenheim Fellowship (2011-12) and was Fellow at the WissenschaftsKolleg in Berlin in 2009. She has written and co-edited over 15 books on critical theory from Hegel to Habermas; Hannah Arendt; discourse ethics, feminist theory and human rights and her work has been translated into 12 languages.

This will be a fully virtual conference, so we hope you will join no matter where you may be. Please visit our Eventbrite page for registration and details!