Rifkind Seminar

The Rifkind Center Arts & Humanities Faculty Seminar was created by Mikhal Dekel, Emily Greble, and Andras Kisery in 2014. The goal of the Interdisciplinary Rifkind Faculty Seminar is to enhance scholarly life on campus; create a greater sense of community among the faculty; expose students to the breadth of their professors’ research and creative activities; raise the public profile of research in the Humanities and Arts at CCNY; encourage interdisciplinary collaboration; and develop new research opportunities for Humanities and Arts faculty.

Seminar topics are broadly defined so as to attract the greatest number of participants from within the Division of the Humanities and the Arts. 10-12 faculty members of all ranks and specializations participate in the year-long seminar. They read a shared group of texts, meet with guest speakers, and present their own works in progress.

The theme for 2025 - 2026 is “Precarity/Resilience”

Sixty years ago, filmmaker Glauber Rocha boldly proclaimed “an aesthetics of hunger” as a technique of thriving amid Brazil’s military dictatorship (1964-1985). Concurrently, the civil rights, social justice, gay liberation, and anti-colonial movements that emerged across the globe employed a variety of tactics of resilience to counter racism, dispossession, and sexual oppression.  Shifts in labor and technology in relation to neoliberal capitalism have put a name to the so-called precariat class, yet precariousness has long been in existence.  Such issues have been explored historically, philosophically (Michel de Certeau’s “making do,” among many other examples) to the current day, including Pulitzer Prize winning poet Natalie Diaz who writes “defiant poems that explore what it means to love and be loved in an America beset by conflict.”

This Rifkind seminar seeks to probe urgent questions raised by these social, historical, and creative processes, including: What are the varying strategies, modes, methods, and languages of resourcefulness and resilience mobilized across time and space to grapple with scarcity and vulnerability? What kinds of agency and subject formations do these tactics envision and what are their modes of address?  To what extent have scholars, critics, cultural workers, institutions, state and private actors amplified, distorted, or exploited frailty and incapacity, dooming practitioners to rigid, inescapable, or imposed formulations?  Does a framework of precarity romanticize poverty and reify extractive and racialized discourses? 

In seeking out ways both to understand the conditions that create precarity and resist the discourses that doom us to its all-encompassing logics, this seminar explores how we can come together as diverse intellectual and creative communities to imagine ways of being in this historical moment.  Precarity extends to notions of belonging and unbelonging (labor, migration, [non]citizenship) and well-being (care, solidarity, networks, allyship). How do we inhabit, consume, produce, teach, map, circulate, disavow, navigate, and resist precarity?  How in our context at CUNY are we uniquely poised to propose anti-dotes to austerity with unruliness, persistence, and DIY gestures beyond characterizations of our communities as gritty, spunky, and tenacious. How do we help each other not just survive, but thrive?

See previous seminar themes & topics

The seminar leader is a full-time research-active faculty member who is selected in rotation from all departments in Humanities and the Arts. He or she collaborates with the following year’s leader to develop the upcoming theme and jointly select the subsequent year’s participants.

The seminar invites one or more speakers whose work is central to the given year’s topic. Speakers join the seminar for a meeting, and usually also give a public lecture to the larger college community. Guests speakers have included Stanley Fish, Timothy Snider, Tara Zahra, Akram Khater, Jesse Printz, among others.

The Rifkind Center posts its theme for the following year around April 1st. After the theme has been announced, interested faculty submit a short bio and a 1-2 page proposal in which they describe their current research or creative project and how the seminar might enhance it.