Abstracts

Keywords: Global, Pentecostalism, Precarious State, Nationalism, Infrastructure

While it had been present on the continent since the first half of the 20th century, Pentecostal Christianity experienced explosive growth in Nigeria in the mid 1990s in the wake of economic precarity and unrelenting political crises. In particular, during the brutal military regime of General Sani Abacha (1993-1998), which repressed all forms of political expression (epitomized by the execution of the Ogoni playwright and activist Ken Saro Wiwa), Pentecostal churches served as a safe space for Nigerians to articulate their frustrations and hopes within the framework of religious ritual and performance. In this paper, I will examine how singular charismatic leaders and their Pentecostal organizations were able to present an alternative vision of modernity to their congregants by contrasting a global pentecostal message to the failed nationalist message of the founding patriarchs of post-independence Africa. I will focus on one Pentecostal group, the Living Faith Church Worldwide, and examine how it’s leader Bishop David Oyedepo has used what I call “miraculous infrastructure” to illustrate that alternative modernity by contrasting it against the crumbling infrastructure of the state and used the Pentecostal message to help his congregants envision themselves as members of a global community rather than a national one. In all of this, Oyedepo and others like him position themselves at the center of a global ecumene in contrast to both missionary Christianity (that inevitably marginalized Africans) and the nationalist message of post-independence leaders.

Keywords: Pedagogy, Destruction, Digital, Electronic

The historical acts of book burning, such as the destruction of the Library at Alexandria, the targeted book burnings of Qin Shi Huang, the annihilation of the House of Knowledge in Baghdad, and the Nazi book burnings, serve as stark reminders of how knowledge is not just created but also destroyed. Today, the precariousness of knowledge storage persists, albeit in a new form. Electronic texts, cloud-based archives, private servers, and digital platforms have replaced physical manuscripts, but these modern mediums carry vulnerabilities of their own—cyberattacks, corporate control, server failures, and data loss pose substantial risks to the preservation of knowledge. This paper, Pedagogy and the Precarity of the Text, explores the parallels between historical knowledge destruction and the contemporary fragility of digital texts. By drawing on examples from both past and present, the paper emphasizes the importance of teaching students the inherent vulnerabilities of physical and digital media. This paper is proposed as an extension of ideas inherent in my Global Topics course on the destruction of art. I will explore strategies of teaching the specific forms of destruction that modern digital media – which for many students is their primary source of textual information – is susceptible. The transient nature of digital formats—coupled with issues of access, ownership, and control—requires an awareness of the potential loss of intellectual and cultural heritage. In this pedagogically focused paper, I aim to explore the best ways of giving students an appreciation of the precariousness of knowledge today.

Keywords: Pedagogy, Global Citizenship, Social Justice, Experiential Learning

The philosophical tenet that undergirds my teaching is that education is a practice of freedom. To borrow from education philosopher Maxine Greene, education for freedom positions learners to understand, to create, and to transform themselves and the world. It is an endeavor at once intellectual and aesthetic, personal and political, individual and communal.

One of the ways I work to exercise education as a practice of freedom is through my work as the faculty advisor to the Liberal Studies Service Ambassadors and the corresponding courses I teach, Critical Service Learning I and II. We begin the year by reading Brazilian educator Paulo Freire, who, in his seminal works on critical pedagogy, calls on us to engage in (and engage students in) praxis—“reflection and action upon the world in order to transform it.” Applying that lens, along with John Dewey’s notion of democracy and education, students begin to explore their own roles and responsibilities as students and as citizens and community members. By combining intellectual and academic work with hands-on experience at community organizations in fields such as education equity, food security, environmental justice, sustainability, and healthcare, the students break out of a charity framework and adopt a justice framework—central to global citizenship. In constant cycles of praxis, they often find themselves transformed and, in small but meaningful ways, act on the world in a way that transforms it. 

The LS Service Ambassadors program provides a compelling reminder that when we consciously foster in students a truly critical consciousness, we prepare them not only to be critical thinkers but also responsible global citizens. In this era of anti-wokeness, amid the assault on progressive education and academic freedom, this is more important than ever.

Keywords: Precarity, Creativity, Queer History, Primary Documents, Archives

In January of 2025, I received a Global Research Initiative Grant to travel to Berlin to study two archives—the Audre Lorde Archive at the Free University of Berlin and the LGBTQ archive at the Schwules Museum. Of particular interest to me, were the ways in which issues around sexuality changed a few years before and after the fall of the wall in 1989. In some respects, homosexuality was officially more tolerated in East Germany than in West Germany, because the East German government wanted to appear more accepting than the West. Still, queer East Germans often mistakenly believed that in the West they would find more acceptance and community.

Bracketing this complicated historical moment, Audre Lorde, lesbian poet, professor, and activist began to visit and teach in Berlin from 1984 to 1992, and is credited with establishing the Afro German movement in Germany. In this paper and presentation, I will explore the question, “How in moments of precarity can the arts create spaces for reframing global landscapes and narratives of resistance?” using the research I’ve done in each of these archives around queer resistance and American and German cross-pollinations. Drawing on primary documents from these archives and my own diary of my time in Berlin, I will explore how precarity and abundance factor into the artistic and political lives of Audre Lorde, an activist group in Berlin called The Bisexual Network, and myself.

Keywords: Migration, Family Interaction, Language Socialization, Video-Mediated Interaction

Increasing domestic and international migration has challenged and reshaped family life and ties that were once dependent on geographic proximity. Migration has given rise to new forms of relational precarity--ones that impact family structures and relationships as extended and even immediate family might be miles and oceans away from one another. Video-mediated technologies, however, have now played a key role in enabling distributed families to maintain kinship. For immigrant families especially, video-calls with remote relatives not only permit the transfer of family knowledge and values (Demirsu, 2021), they also offer opportunities for heritage language socialization (Lexander & Androutsopoulos, 2023).

In this talk, I aim to offer insights into transnational family life by examining how intergenerational bond and intimacy is established in Facetime calls. Specifically, in this longitudinal case study, I conduct a video-based analysis of a discursive practice called ""virtual kissing"" --a way for adult Chinese immigrant family members to socialize a bilingual toddler into expressing affection for her grandparents in Hong Kong. By tracing the trajectory of how virtual kissing is orchestrated over 24 months, I show how kissing constitutes a social action that facilitates the reciprocation of closeness and affection—what Katila and Cekaite (2023) call “affective reciprocity.” As the toddler grows, she develops greater interactional competence in leave-taking and expressing affection at the closing phase of the calls. By describing how the displays of affection are mediated by technology, this talk discusses vulnerabilities of family relationships caused by migration and how the Chinese diaspora mitigate such relational precarities in video-calls.

Keywords: Environmental Justice, Marginalized Communities, Precarity, Inequity

In the middle of Romania’s busiest highway, hidden in plain sight, lies the community of Garcini. Known to many, yet absent from many official records, Garcini community epitomizes the paradox born from historical racialization and the marginalization of Roma communities who have lived there for almost a century.

Following the fall of the Communist regime, many Roma struggled to secure employment, leaving the Garcini area entrenched in systemic poverty. To survive, they often take on informal labor in nearby cities, collecting household waste and construction debris from non-Roma residents. With no proper disposal sites available, they are forced to bring this refuse back to Garcini, creating toxic dumps laden with hazardous materials, like asbestos. Children play among these dangerous remnants, while livestock graze nearby, heightening daily exposure to environmental hazards.

This environmental precarity represents just one layer of the multifaceted injustices faced by the Roma people. Through a minute description of the Garcini community, this paper explores how environmental hazards know no boundaries, and disproportionately affect vulnerable populations across the world, threatening their lives and social/cultural traditions.

Drawing on ethnographic research I conducted over  the past two years in Garcini, Romania, this paper analyzes the intersecting impacts of systemic discrimination, socio-economic exclusion, and environmental degradation on Roma communities. Using the frameworks of environmental justice and human rights, this paper (re)evaluates the concept of “the global” in the age of environmental precarity. 

In addressing the question — To what extent can teaching and research across academic disciplines develop and instill values of responsible global citizenship (while connecting environmental sustainability and eradication of global inequalities)? — this paper illustrates how interdisciplinary scholarship can illuminate and mitigate environmental vulnerabilities.In doing so, it highlights the interconnected precarities caused by inequity: the precarity of community health, of cultural and social heritage, of all forms of life in the area and beyond, and, last but not least, the dire precarity of the environment.

Keywords: Precariousness, Labor Precarity, Supply Chains, Bangladesh

As a concept in the social sciences, precarity emerged in the shadow of critical transformations of the global capitalist economy. The conditions of life for many people across the globe are uneven and tenuous, marked by insecure work and unstable futures. Precarity describes and conceptualizes the “unpredictable cultural and economic terrain and conditions of life” that are a hallmark of the 21st century (Sharryn Kasmir 2018). Arguably, its emergence indexes or signals a set of shifts in sentiments and values as well as changes in socio-political structures over the last four decades.

Precarity has many forms yet theorizing around the concept takes the Euro-American welfare state and its decline as the implicit historical model. This is only possible by forgetting that  “precarity has always been a feature of capitalist societies” and that precariousness has perpetually characterised working people’s lives, especially in the Global South (ibid, emphasis mine).” 

In this paper, I move away from precarity as abstract concept to one of embodied, material experience, to ask what it means to live inside precarity. I draw on ethnographic research with garment workers in Bangladesh whose conditions of life epitomize precarity and unpredictability. Precarity in this context is not a new  experience but one built into the highly asymmetrical global garment supply chain. I end with some reflections on “precariousness” as an ontological condition of vulnerability and insecurity as it shapes the subjectivities of women workers.

Keywords: Francoism, Fascism, Contemporary Far-Right, Vox

The global rise of reactionary, authoritarian and neofascist ideologies is one of today's most relevant and pressing political issues. The presence of far-right formations in parliaments across the world is no longer the exceptional phenomenon, but the norm. The reactionary ideology they defend (ultranationalist, anti-feminist, homophobic, xenophobic, anti-science, racist) is increasingly gaining social visibility and political traction. It is not surprising, in light of this, that it has become commonplace to draw historical analogies with the interwar years, and that there has been a major debate about the remnants and possible returns of classical forms of fascism. Talking about fascism seems unavoidable today. With a focus on Spain, my paper reflects on the ongoing recrudescence of racist, patriarchal, and ethnonationalist ideologies, and analyzes some of the discursive and political strategies employed by the contemporary Spanish far-right. More specifically, it examines how far-right movements and political organizations such as the party Vox have reactivated part of the patriotic, imperialistic, and militaristic rhetoric of the 30s and 40s, around which the Francoist apparatus of torture and death was constructed, and have productively re-adapted it to suit their contemporary purposes. In particular, it addresses three ideological-cultural frameworks that exemplify the relapse of the patriotic and bellicose language of the Civil War and the postwar period: the imaginary of the “anti-Spain,” the medieval myth of the “Reconquest” (“Reconquista”), and the narrative of anti-communism. Overall, the aim of the paper is to expose the connections between the ideological dynamics of Franco's fascist violence and the ones that underpin the far-right discourse of the 21st century.

Keywords: USAID, Higher Education, Global Networks

Since the Trump administration has effectively shuttered USAID, imposing first an aid freeze and then canceling the vast majority of the organization’s 40 plus billion dollars-worth of contracts, the aid community around the world has sounded the alarm on impacts to humanitarian relief and development operations – impacts that have been felt almost immediately. The precarity of emergency global food and medical relief in particular was made immediately and painfully visible. Less reported on however are the impacts to global knowledge networks of the loss of income from the world’s single largest aid supplier, specifically networks involving higher education. For among its many avenues of aid USAID is also a funding source for universities in the Global South and for cross-university research projects in areas intended to benefit vulnerable countries. In the wake of the USAID aid freeze, universities around the world have begun a reckoning, taking stock of the inevitable hits to global educational infrastructure and knowledge production. Among the areas that will be affected are: 1) scholarships for international students; 2) direct aid to universities in lower-income countries, with many projects targeted toward employment capacity-building; and 3) grants for collaborative research projects between US and non-US educational institutions, the majority involving agriculture/food security, public health/pandemic preparedness, and climate change. While a conversation in many countries around the need for higher ed resilience and self-reliance at the national level has begun, no clear alternative for USAID’s support for international research networks has yet been proposed. Integrating theories of global networks and risk, this talk will assess how the USAID freeze lays bare precarities within the global infrastructure of higher education as international development and as a key agent in building knowledge capacity response to emerging crises.

Keywords: Taxonomy, History Of Science, Linguistics

Common names of species are important for communicating with the general public. In principle, these names should provide an accessible way to engage with and identify species. The common names of species have historically been labile without standard guidelines, even within a language. Currently, there is no systematic assessment of how often common names communicate identifiable and biologically relevant characteristics about species. This is a salient issue in ornithology, where common names are used more often than scientific names for species of birds in written and spoken English, even by professional researchers. To gain a better understanding of the types of terminology used in the English-language common names of bird species, a group of 85 professional ornithologists and non-professional contributors classified unique descriptors in the common names of all recognized species of birds. In the AvianLexiconAtlas database produced by this work, each species' common name is assigned to one of ten categories associated with aspects of avian biology, ecology, or human culture. Across 10,906 species of birds, 89% have names describing the biology of the species, while the remaining 11% of species have names derived from human cultural references, human names, or local non-English languages. Species with common names based on features of avian biology are more likely to be related to each other or be from the same geographic region. The crowdsourced data collection also revealed that many common names contain specialized or historic terminology unknown to many of the data collectors, and we include these terms in a glossary and gazetteer alongside the dataset. The AvianLexiconAtlas can be used as a quantitative resource to assess the state of terminology in English-language common names of birds. Future research using the database can shed light on historical approaches to nomenclature, the legacy of colonialism that is retained in these names, and the extent to which these English common names provide an accessible entry point into learning about birds.

Keywords: International Art And Artist Collectives, Postwar And Avant-Garde Art And Art Collectives, Performance Poetry, Sound Poetry, Visual Poetry And Poetics

I propose a paper on Collective Task’s upcoming 3-day workshop, performance, and art exhibition, hosted by NYU-Florence (La Pietra), which was awarded a Global Research Initiative sponsorship early this year. March 13-16, fellow members of the international artist collective, Collective Task, will join Prof. Robert Fitterman and I to collaborate with NYU-Florence faculty and produce a multidisciplinary response to a collectively designed “task.” Our workshop takes its form from the innovative art collective Collective Task, which has been ongoing since 2006, and has been supported by venues such as MoMA and the Berlin Poetry Festival. Collective Task is comprised of 30 International writers and artists. Its basic premise is simple: each month, the group receives a task that comes from one of our members. The collective then has one month to complete the “task” in any medium. After the month is complete, all responses are posted on our website. Importantly, the given tasks encourage responses that activate art as a mode of civic response. During our exhibition in March, I will document my experience with the aim of crafting a direct response to the following LS symposium question in my paper: How in moments of precarity can the arts create spaces for reframing global landscapes and narratives of resistance?

Keywords: Translingualism, Publishing, Poetry, Decolonialization of Language

Hi, I can talk about editing and publishing multilingual and non-normative literary texts. I’m editing SDVIG: Translingual Avantgardes, a translingual poetry series for Rab-Rab Press in Helsinki. Our first book is Lostlingual by Dinara Rasuleva. The book is written in four languages: Tatar, Russian, English, and German, which often meet in the body of a single poem. Born in Tatarstan, an “autonomous” region in the Russian Federation, Rasuleva emigrated to Berlin from Moscow for political reasons in 2014. It is in Germany that she became a prominent young Russian-language poet and performer. After the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine, Rasuleva started writing in Tatar, the language of her childhood. Since Tatar was never her school language, it suffered tremendous attrition as the author was leading an adult life away from her place of birth and family. Rasuleva’s Lostlingual project consisted in her trying to write in Tatar as she remembered it, not always “correctly.” She wound up adding the other languages of her linguistic environment. The result was a poetry that violated every rule of linguistic purism. It put off some of the author’s earlier Russian-language fans but it was also denied entry to the few Tatar literary institutions in existence, because of the linguistic and aesthetic conservatism of the latter. And who would publish a book where four languages blended into one another, in which the lead language—Tatar—was a Turkic tongue without a state and without an intellectual diaspora? I matched the author with Rab-Rab Press, a tiny anglophone publishing house in Helsinki run by a Turkish-speaking Kosovar Albanian, which publishes the most radical expressions of twentieth-century avantgarde, including poetry in made-up languages, for an English-speaking audience in Europe. Then I began to deeply regret my precipitous act, because editing such a manuscript proved a horrorshow. Were we to translate the poems into English? If we did, everyone would read them in English, i.e. they would lose what’s most important about them—their translingualism. Were we to publish the poems as they are? But it would be next to impossible to find readers who read all of the book’s four languages. So we—actually, the author—worked out a compromise system of explanations, glossaries, and partial translations, by which English speakers used to multilingual environments, that is to say: most educated Europeans, would be able to make some sense of the book. Then there was the issue of standardization. Printing entails standardization, because otherwise random changes would be read as meaningful. But standardization went against the whole Lostlingual project of writing a childhood language as one remembered it, with all the errors. At the same time, the author wrote Tatar in three different transcription systems (one Cyrillic, two Latin)—in addition to three other languages, three transcription systems were just too much, I thought. Finally, all of her explanations were written in an English of a person who has never lived in an English-speaking country. Was I to transform them into standard English? Was I to leave them as is, at the risk of activating the strong linguistic prejudices of native and near-native English speakers? Anyway, I can talk about all this and maybe even the book will be back from the printers in June, who knows.

Keywords: Ecocentrism, Egocentrism, Environmentalism

The Earth faces interconnected climate, biodiversity, and ecological health crises, all deeply intertwined with injustice and inequity. Yet, education and society often overlook these fundamental linkages. Dominant Western colonial perspectives promote a human-centered hierarchy, prioritizing select people over others and the natural world. In contrast, more promising ecocentric approaches envision human beings as embedded in earth systems and cycles, equitably interrelated with each other and nonhuman life forms. In our globalized world, ideas, pollutants, pathogens, and people move through complex networks, impacting each other in myriad ways. Underserved communities and non-human life bear disproportionate burdens, a core tenet of the environmental justice movement. This intersectionality refutes the reductionist misconception that environmentalism is elitist, expensive, exclusive, or unimportant. It behooves everyone, including those engaged in higher education, to better understand and reevaluate these issues. This paper therefore presents five exercises: walking tours of Central Park, The High Line, Hudson River Park, and the East River Greenway, from the "A Walk in the Park for Environmental Justice" collection, and "A Tour of Sustainable NYU." These online StoryMaps, accessible on smartphones and other devices, offer onsite learning experiences to explore environmental justice within the context of climate change and ecological health. Each 75-minute walk incorporates audio-visual information, reflections, and wildlife identification opportunities. By embracing ecocentrism, these walking tours aim to reconceptualize the global more inclusively, combatting precarity by fostering a more just and sustainable future.

Keywords: Embodied AI, Social Justice, Social Robotics, AI-Fiction, Technological Humanism

I discuss the current cultural and technological trends of robotics and embodied AI generally, and contrast these with the origin of the word robot, from the Czech word robota. My survey of the origins and mutation of the idea of robot in both fact and fiction extends from its Czech origins with Karel Capek, and its cybernetic reconceptualization in Stanislaw Lem, to the contemporary partnerships and  interdisciplinary projects developing between NYU's Tandon School of Engineering and the Silver School of Social Work. The “Embodied AI” of my title refers to any integration of artificial intelligence with sensory and motor capabilities that enable such systems to learn and develop by interacting with their environments. The hope for such integrations is collaborative developments between humans and robots beyond the roles that robots now play on factory floors and in surgical theaters. The idea is to conceive of spaces for delivering social services where these are badly needed, e.g., in schools and other social environments that are traditionally and systematically neglected. Can AI assist in the analysis of structural inequalities and also the development of appropriate systems for overcoming such barriers to deliver social services? Can new kinds of robots support social services during an era of government cuts to such services?  To deal intelligently and compassionately with such social deficits, it is incumbent on educators, humanists and engineers to explore the space between utopian and dystopian visions of AI, robotics and social media.

Keywords: Biopolitics, Capital, Precarity, Power, Critical Theory

This paper explores a presumed abandonment of some human life by large-scale structures of human organization and the exercises of power that enable such abandonments.

The essay stages a necessary, though rarely undertaken, encounter between philosophers on the subject of the precariousness of contemporary life. With reference to what is sometimes referred to as the biopolitical age, I trace an historical transformation of the exercise of power from a singular sovereign to a distributive democratic system that make the category of human life the focal point of modern political power. I juxtapose this biopolitics to the ways that other prominent thinkers have outlined conditions that make human subjects vulnerable as a result in shifting parameters of contemporary power.

The paper addresses the creation of lived precarity and argues for a redefined concept of human political life – the bios of contemporary experience – at its center.

Keywords: Technology, AI, Literature, Legend

In today’s rapidly changing world, the idea of the “global” is more complicated than ever. Instead of a connected, unified whole, we see a world shaped by many forces—technology, inequality, and shifting power structures—a precarious situation that creates both opportunities and risks. Artificial Intelligence, in particular, presents an epistemological challenge, not just to our understanding of global connectivity, but to our definition of what it means to be human. 

This paper explores the hopes and fears surrounding AI by examining stories about the creation of objects or entities that mimic the human form. In honor of our global site in Prague, the paper begins with the legend of the Golem as a protector of the Jewish people in a time of extreme precarity. In some versions of the story, the Golem succeeds as a protector, only to become a force of destruction when left uncontrolled. It thus mirrors our ambivalent attitude toward AI, a powerful construct that mimics the human mind rather than the human body.

Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein presents another powerful construct. As an entity pieced together from unrelated parts, the “monster” is an apt metaphor for the fragmented, intermittently connected state of contemporary global affairs. 

What can these cautionary tales teach us about the utopian promises and existential threats of AI? This paper will analyze these stories within the cultural and historical contexts of their times as a way of reframing today’s technological crisis as part of a recurrent cycle.

Keywords: Absurdist Literature, Existentialism, Kafkaesque, Literary Convention, Literary Dissent

A real book must be the axe for the frozen sea in us.” (Kafka, in a letter to a friend)

The term “Kafkaesque” brings to mind themes of absurdity, of the powerless and the disaffected, of alienation and unjust persecution, of faceless bureaucracies, invasive technologies and subversive power structures--all themes that may easily describe our own age. Born into a German- and Yiddish-speaking Jewish family in the Czech-speaking city of Prague, Kafka represents an author who lived through World War I and the breakup of the Habsburg empire and who sees much of his world as an outsider, an observer on the outside, looking in. Resisting traditional forms of literature, one could easily describe Kafka as a reactive author whose work forces the reader to re-evaluate their expectations of conventional literary traditions.

Critics have offered dozens of interpretations of “The Metamorphosis”—interpretations that range from the symbolic to the allegorical, from the biographical to the psychoanalytic, from the absurdist to the existential, from the Freudian to the Marxist—interpretations that attempt to answer the question, what does “The Metamorphosis” mean? However, Kafka’s story may very well challenge this very question. Is Kafka, who is a brilliant stylist, a master of parables, and a comic surrealist, playing with our need to find the hidden meaning in what may be a meaningless and unjust world—by way of the absurd world of Gregor Samsa? 

If we take a careful look, we see that many of our literary assumptions, both in the style and the content of this story, are resisted. Instead, this “anti-fairytale” offers an incongruity between what might be anticipated and what actually occurs. In order to establish this incongruity, Kafka uses a series of inversions and reversals that challenge our desire for meaning. Kafka’s refusal to conform to our expectations and his defiance of literary conventions forces us to question the idea of meaning and justice itself—both in literature and of life.

Keywords: Archaeology, Late Bronze Age, Medieval, Resilience, Collapse

Archaeologists are often concerned—one might even say “preoccupied”—with precarity, crisis, and above all, collapse (or what might be thought of as its inverse: resilience). For those living during periods of crisis, these events are often unforeseen and almost unthinkable, moments when stable political, social, economic, etc. orders are suddenly upended. From a broader perspective, however, one of the most basic insights of anthropology is that even the most stable orders must be constantly reinforced, reproduced, and renegotiated. Crisis ensues when the mechanisms for reproducing these orders no longer function as they once did. Yet, it is precisely during these moments of crisis that new orders, institutions, and ways of life can, for better or worse, emerge. Eric Cline’s recent popular works, 1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed and After 1177 B.C.: The Survival of Civilizations, have demonstrated the utility of past crises in thinking about our own historical moment and what might follow it. Like our present moment, the period leading up to the 12th century BC was one of polycrisis, to borrow Edgar Morin’s term, and in the subsequent centuries, different groups collectively responded in different ways, some of which were more successful than others. In a historical coincidence, the period leading up to the 12th century AD was also a period of crisis and transformation in the eastern Mediterranean, with parallels to both the crises of the 12th century BC and 21st century AD. In this paper, I will explore several of these parallels, notably the possibilities for creative transformation provided by crises, and briefly discuss how these might be useful in teaching the Late Bronze Age collapse (and its reflections in Homer) and the period of the Crusades. 

Keywords: Global Englishes, Pedagogy, Linguistic Landscapes, Cultural Identities

Centuries of linguistic chauvinism from the British and American empires has ingrained in people’s minds the idea that English is superior to other languages. English as the language of education, science, technology, international relations, and entertainment has changed global linguistic landscapes and cultural identities. English is seen as the language of prestige to the extent that children in traditionally non-English speaking countries speak English with their parents instead of their home language. In such sites, English, as a prestigious commodity and a marker of modernity, is displayed promptly on the local landscape from traffic signs to billboards to museum signage. Recently, U.S. Senator Bernie Moreno introduced the “English Language Unity Act,” a bill to make English the official language of the United States. This move is in line with anti-immigrant politics within the United States and how, historically, the English language has been used as a tool for American empire building both within our borders and across the globe. In American cities, we see the diversity of cultures on display and, at the same time, we hear hateful rhetoric directed toward these cultures. How can past moments of precarity, as it relates to the English language, inform how we teach in the present moment? How can learning about the history of the United States through the lens of sociolinguistics and examining linguistic landscapes help students understand how we have arrived at the present moment and where we go from here? The aim of this paper is to provide examples of pedagogical approaches and assignments to answer these questions.

Keywords: Resilience, Narratives Of Resistance, Global Landscapes

This paper will consider resilience and creativity as strategies evolved by Caribbean people for articulating and surviving conditions of persistent precarity.

Resourcefulness and resilience are almost stereotypical aspects of Caribbean identities. The qualities are, and have been historically necessary to survive slavery, colonialism, economic crises, and natural disasters. All of this is to say that life in the Caribbean has been precarious since Columbus’s arrival.  

Across the Caribbean, resilience and resistance have been articulated through music. A powerful example is the emergence of reggae in Jamaica in the 1960s and its evolution into a vehicle for social commentary and protest, responding to the economic crisis and consequent social destabilization that afflicted Jamaica in the 1970s. Locally, reggae articulated the critical response of Rastafarians to the Jamaican state’s neocolonial subordination to Western imperialism and its failure to fulfill the promise of freedom and dignity for Black people made at the time of independence. 

Australian journalist Brent Clough refers to ”the long echo of music from Jamaica” that has established reggae as a global cultural form that has carved out transcultural spaces of critique against oppression in communities in countries as disparate as New Zealand, the UK, the USA, Poland, and across the continent of Africa. Reggae also asserts faith in the potential for surviving the uncertainty of living in conditions of economic and environmental precarity, for example the iconic song “Jah no Dead” and the more recent “Who Knows?” 

Keywords: Guantanamo, Legal Black Hole, Asylum Seekers, Trump, Habeas Corpus

Of the 12,000,000 “illegal” immigrants from around the world in the U.S., over 4,000,000 are asylum seekers, subject to detention at ICE’s discretion while awaiting immigration hearings. With only 735 immigration judges, each having a backlog of 4,000 cases, adjudication takes years.  On January 29, 2025, simultaneously with the end of the “catch and release” policy which allowed asylum seekers to live unhindered in the U.S., the Trump Administration announced the re-opening of Guantanamo to accommodate 30,000 ICE detainees. Detainees may petition for release, but that requires a writ of habeas corpus in federal district court.  “The Privilege of the Writ of Habeas Corpus shall not be suspended, unless when in Cases of Rebellion or Invasion the Public Safety may require it” (U.S. Constitution, Art. 1, Sec. 9, Cl.2).  This legal doctrine means, if one is detained by authorities, one may petition the court, forcing those authorities to produce the detainee (“produce the body”) and justify said detention to a judge.

In the early 2000s, Guantanamo was a notorious “legal black hole.” The 1950 USSC Eintrager decision held that aliens detained by American authorities not on sovereign U.S. territory had no right to habeas corpus.  Since the 1903 Treaty between the U.S. and the newly formed Cuban government gave Cuba sovereignty and the U.S. legal jurisdiction, Guantanamo detainees could not file a habeas petition.  The USSC reversed Eintrager in Boumedienne (2008), holding that the U.S. had jurisdiction at Guantanamo as de facto sovereign, thereby permitting detainees to file for habeas. 

My comments discuss whether the Trump Administration could re-open the “legal black hole,” exposing a new generation of Guantanamo detainees to legal precarity by denying them the right to habeas corpus, either by asking a conservative USSC to reverse Boumedienne or by invoking the Suspension Clause in cases of “Invasion,” the nomenclature used by Trump to describe the current state of immigration. 

Keywords: Generative AI, Prometheus, Protocol, Core Curriculum, Literary Theory

This paper initially was inspired by the myth of Prometheus. His story of stealing fire from the gods to bestow this techne upon humanity, itself an act of resistance and rebellion from a tyrannical Zeus, has never been more relevant today. In the 21st century, educators are at a crossroads. Feeling pressures from society, parents, and students about the role, purpose, and value of a college education, faculty are now also under siege from the emergence of large language models (LLMs like ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, etc.). This is especially true of faculty who teach in a core curriculum in which students already see little value for their post-college lives. Chatbots, therefore, enter at the worst possible moment. What motivation is there for students to not use ChatGPT? The myth of Prometheus which is about theft, rebellion, resistance, and a benefaction to humanity led me to think of a use for generative chatbots that was unintended. This was going to be my act of rebellion and resistance. Chatbots were developed and advertised as a way of simplifying mundane tasks and ultimately lessening demand for some office jobs and putting people out of work. Chatbots cut costs, and one of the biggest costs in any company is employee wages. With these concerns in mind, I developed a protocol for the introduction of generative chatbots into a large survey style course like our core curriculum. Here, my learning goal was to shift student and faculty thinking about chatbots from one of an oracle or hostility respectively towards a collaborator. I will share this protocol during the symposium and plan to implement it in my own course in the fall semester. However, I am left ambivalent about the whole project, considering the ethical and environmental implications of this technology.

Keywords: Popular Culture, East Asia, Teaching

From Barbie to BTS, pop culture on a global scale ostensibly unites people around the world, bringing disparate groups together based upon a shared love of media, music and art. However, global popular culture also highlights riffs between countries, emphasizing their differences rather than drawing people together. Regarding East Asia specifically, popular culture exposes flashpoints in foreign relations, reflecting historic tensions and contemporary conflicts. In their tendency to capitalize on the immediate political and cultural time period, moments in popular culture have drawn attention to long-simmering feuds amongst the countries of East Asia. In East Asia, the release of a song from BTS member Jin inflamed the dispute between South Korea and Japan regarding naming conventions (2021); Sino-Vietnamese tensions regarding territorial integrity were laid bare in the popularization of the Barbie film (2023). How can making these connections help us as educators? Using pop culture examples in the classroom involves students on a more personal and direct level, one that compels their interest in broader historical events. This proposal aligns with the goals of the symposium in that it evaluates how the precarities of the past influence the precarities of the present, and demonstrates how media can be unintentionally (or intentionally) political and provocative.

Keywords: Harlem Renaissance, Prague, Liberation Movements, Translation, Transnationalism, Cultural Networks

Black Atlantic conversations center discourse between Black American theorists and cultural producers and U.K. intellectuals (Gilroy, 1995). Veering from this oft-used exchange, this presentation looks at how Black internationalism was also formed from another critical conversation, that between Prague and Black Americans during the New Negro Movement and the Harlem Renaissance.

Because of segregation and the refusal of access to higher education and certain fields of study, many Blacks like W.E.B. DuBois, Alain Locke, Anna Julia Cooper, and Carter G. Woodson left America for studies in Europe. What is often missing is how their presence created a bidirectional conversation that influences liberation and literary movements.

Looking at Alain Locke’s book “The New Negro: An Interpretation” and Langston Hughes works, the two saw Prague as a site where the complications of dialect and culture were key to Czechoslovakia’s liberation. Locke described the German Jewish dialect there as a “deterritorialized language” (Sabatos, 2017) and used this smaller cultural thrust as a comparison to Black American language and culture. Some scholars argue how Hughes, who spent much of his formative years in Cleveland, Ohio, which had the largest Czech ethnic community, takes from his studies there to build a robust theoretical framework to criticize both racism and capitalism in jazz poetry and other forms of creative pieces woven throughout what would be the Harlem Renaissance.

Of other note, the Czech’s began to translate Hughes’ poetry in 1928 with his book, “The Weary Blues.” While Hughes does not use tractors, meaning the machine for agriculture, in his prose, in the Czech translation, it did. Moreover, this mentioning and subsequent translations became a key cultural component that signified collective strength during the Cold War that showed “points of contact in unexpected places” (Scharmova, 2023).

The aim of this inquiry is to explore the notion that Black internationalism from the lens and practice of Black Americans, incorporated the ideas of race and ethnicity with non-Black peoples’ liberation struggles at precarious moments. On the other hand, to see how the cultural products of Black Americans fueled collective resistance amongst intellectuals and the masses in Prague.

Keywords: Architecture, Art, Crisis, Disease, Pandemic

Throughout history, global cultures have been transformed by cycles of disease. Today, emerging disease outbreaks such as the bird flu (H5N1 avian influenza), Ebola, and measles are flashpoints of global crisis threatening public health and highlighting the impact of health disparities. In moments of precarity such as this, art and architecture can provide spaces for framing global narratives of resistance to disease and memorializing past casualties, which may serve as lessons and inspiration for contemporary moments of crisis. This presentation explores several global examples of plague monuments and other productions of art and architecture that illustrate how past encounters with disease have shaped our cultural landscape in somber and inspiring ways. Examination of these historic works will be placed in the context of teaching and learning in a global liberal arts curriculum. Beginning in Prague, artifacts of the 1713-1715 plague epidemic which dot the city’s landscapes will be discussed along with tips for engaging students in experiential learning with the city serving as text that reveals lessons about pandemic history. Additional examples from Africa and East Asia will be explored, drawing parallels to similar historic sites in New York City. The final portion of this presentation will provide a brief overview of an interactive learning module titled “Touring the Pandemic History of Greenwich Village.” This module guides learners on a virtual or physical walking tour of the Greenwich Village neighborhood of New York City showcasing evidence of smallpox, cholera, AIDS, influenza, and COVID-19 embedded into the physical landscape of the city. Collectively, the examples discussed here will guide teachers and learners in a global exploration of artistic representations of disease and the global narratives of resistance and resilience that they embody. 

Keywords: Activism, Archiving, Social Media, Global Cinema Distribution, Protest Movements

In a pivotal scene in Mohammad Rasoulof’s 2024 The Seed of the Sacred Fig, a thriller about the family of a Tehran judge during the 2022 Woman/Life/Freedom protests, the judge’s two daughters are exchanging violent social media videos of protests while their mother next to them watches the state-controlled television news reporting on the same protests. Beyond commentary on intergenerational news consumption, this scene utilizes actual social media footage from the protests to serve as documentary indexicality of the events. 

While social media apps allow for resistance movements to be (live) broadcast across borders (especially in places where traditional media has no access), it has simultaneously created new situations of precarity. Violating official state narratives and/or exposing one’s location- whether in this case in Iran or in recent cases through executive orders in the US targeting social media activity - put the authors in a precarious position where they are torn between documenting atrocities and facing grave backlashes to their own livelihoods. This presentation asks, what happens when a fiction film takes over the role of archiving a community’s forbidden activism? What happens to the clips, the original authors, the new director and the overall message(s) intended for one audience and now reframed for another? 

Addressing the theme of “Remapping the ‘Global’ in the Age of Precarity,” this presentation takes Rasoulof’s film as a case study to critically engage with ways in which social media contributes to creating new spaces for repositioning narratives of resistance by examining global, local, sympathetic and adversarial positions that play a role in the framing, distribution, and ultimate archiving of protests movements in the 2020s.

Keywords: Destruction, Development, Futurescape

Since Goethe’s Faust in the 1830s and the Haussmannization of Paris in the mid-19th century, city building and urban development have been closely linked to destruction, demolition, and displacement, as well as creation of utopian spectacles. Faust begins with a wager between Mephisto and God over humanity's precarious condition, whether there is any hope left for humanity.  In the final act of Faust, the protagonist is redeemed, because  constructs a city on land granted to him by the emperor, envisioning a utopia built at an astonishing pace, with construction workers laboring around the clock,  even though he displaces longtime inhabitants and setting ablaze their  home and garden. Similarly, Haussmann’s Paris saw the forced displacement of 350,000 Parisians over 18 years, as medieval neighborhoods were bulldozed to make way for wide boulevards—pushing many to the outskirts, forming the banlieues. The French emperor’s strategy stated military logic-- no more insurrections, barricades or tunnel-like arcades-- while also embracing Saint-Simonian ideals of large-scale public works, employment generation, and the infrastructure of a consumer society. 

Urban development has never been ideologically unified. However, it consistently generates futurescapes—spectacular and compelling images of an envisioned future, shaping present possibilities through representations of cities, rivieras, and islands. This paper examines the ways the spectacular emergence of  Saadiyat Cultural District (SCD) in Abu Dhabi, goes beyond the horizons of expectations proper to modernity, or ‘post-modernity’ by rendering precarious the very notion of historical time, and the very horizons of expectation. 

Keywords: Precarity, Global, Canon

The English literature canon functions both as a portal and sentry.  Authors  who are welcomed through this hallowed literary passageway enter an exclusive club where their European-based aesthetic sensibilities  and cultural productions are deemed to represent the universal human experience. These canonized narratives position the cultures that produce them as High Cultures the concomitant peoples as superior peoples. Noncanonized stories and the people who create them  are too often perceived as nonstandard and inferior by default. Disrupting and expanding the canon is a liberatory move in this present historical moment of racial and ethnic precarity. Specifically,  vulnerable brown and black subjects—and their socio-historical experiences—are increasingly demonized, their bodies  more easily assaulted, their voices  more often silenced and their histories more likely to be erased. The result of this historical moment is an unimaginable precarity. Canonized stories that represent the brilliance, complexity and profundity of global peoples, and the cultures from which they hail, can impact the international discourse about  who is viewed as fully human and who deserves to be treated as such. The canon is a living document of stories that   unquestionably is tied to questions around “the civilized” and “the uncivilized.” Global history has shown the world  that civilized and uncivilized designations have  been the foundation for determining who is the colonizer and  who is the enslaver and who is the colonized and who is the enslaved.  By disrupting and expanding the canon we can trouble these troubling questions and answers by centering and including the narratives and cultures of peoples who have been historically marginalized.

Keywords: Antiracism, Pedagogy, Culture Or Religion, Collective Identities, Global Citizenship

As far right movements, alongside broader anti-immigrant politics, are animated by cultural and civilizational discourses, we must critically examine our presentation of “cultures” in our classrooms. Scholars have used the concept of “cultural racism” to describe the essentializing of cultural difference especially prevalent in perceptions of Muslims as determined by their cultural and religious heritage. This paper considers recent experiences of teaching the first two Global Works and Society courses centered on global philosophical and religious texts, many of which are seen as foundational to specific cultural traditions. While I sought to challenge essentialist notions of “culture” as unified, homogenous engines of history in all my teaching (including texts of the so-called “Western” canon), I discuss teaching the Qur’an and Islamic philosophy. In class, I emphasized: 1) historical context and contingency of the emergence of Islam; 2) exchange and dialogue between cultural and religious traditions; and 3) diversity within Islam, including divergent modern reinterpretations. Broadly, I offered students resources for thinking about cultures and religions as interpretive frameworks that are flexible and dynamic, rather than determinants of history or identity. Nevertheless, I found that students speak of these courses, perhaps especially when globalized, as forms of multicultural education that positions them to better understand other communities. Although distinct from far-right racism, multiculturalism can reinforce essentialist notions of cultural difference that contribute to cultural racism. Hence, I also interrogate the effectiveness of my approaches, consider enhancements, and reflect on the challenges we face in teaching “cultures” today.

Keywords: Cycles, Mothers, Archives, Photography

My talk is inspired by my work in the Acton Photography Archive at Villa La Pietra, NYU Florence. This archive is comprised of the family photographs of Hortense Mitchell, her husband, Arthur Acton, and their two sons William and Harold, who bequeathed their villa to NYU. These images, dating from the 1870s to the mid-1990s, showcase generations of Americans abroad and photographic media evolving throughout the century. I came to learn about the Acton Photography Archive speaking with Dr. Scott Palmer, who digitized the collection (although these digital images are currently unavailable publicly by wishes of the estate). In June, I’ll be located at Villa La Pietra to view the collection—comprised of over 16,700 items—on a GRI fellowship. I’m particularly interested in viewing photographs of Hortense Mitchell’s childhood in Chicago alongside her experience of motherhood in Italy. My work in Italy is part of a larger investigation of family photographs at NYU’s global sites. For example, consider a family scrapbook of a Panamanian student relaxing in the late 1930s with her friends in Washington Square Park in the Beryl Cobham Collection, donated by her daughter [https://findingaids.library.nyu.edu/archives/mc_360/] and processed by my collaborator in NYU-NY Special Collections, Dr. Janet Bunde. Relatedly, I am also collaborating with Prof. Gregory Pardlo of NYU-AD to explore family collections in the Akkasah Photography Center. My talk will ask how images of motherhood, some reaching us from over century ago, can remap notions of the global (and the local) in these precarious times.

Keywords: Global Citizenship, Decolonizing The Curriculum, South-South Migration, Nativism, Latin America

In recent decades, migration has become a global phenomenon. Although millions continue to leave the global south looking for opportunities in the global north, migration within the global south has grown faster in recent years. In Latin America, more people migrate to neighboring countries than to the U.S. or Europe. Countries like Peru, Chile and Costa Rica have seen rapid growth in its immigrant population. In Chile, immigrants went from representing 1% of the population in 2005 to being more than 10% in 2024. What policies do developing countries in Latin America adopt to respond to the migration waves? How do national populations react to the growing immigrant population? Do politicians embrace anti-immigrant platforms as in the global north? Understanding the dynamics of migration in the global south helps decolonize the curriculum by moving beyond the idea that migrants leave the global south to find opportunities in the global north. Studying the policy response to migration and public opinion trends in countries with recent immigration growth in recent years will contribute to a broader understanding of concepts like nativism, discrimination and social inclusion. When migration occurs in countries where mixed blood (mestizos) nationals discriminate against other mestizo people—Chileans or Peruvians adopting nativist positions to reject the arrival of Venezuelans or Colombians—we can study dimensions of migration that are not observed in the global north. This paper will challenge conventional wisdom on how we study the causes and consequences of immigration by looking into migration within the global south.

Keywords: Food Culture, Local Food (Locavore), Food Insecurity, Pedagogy 

Quintessentially encompassing both "the global" and "precarity," the so-called Arab-Israeli conflict is typically discussed and taught via fields such as political science, history, conflict studies, and religious studies.  Valuable contributions have also been made by sociologists, anthropologists, and cultural studies specialists.  For over 20 years my own pedagogy utilized scholarship from a mixture of these fields, with heavy reliance on history, political science, and law.  While powerfully productive, they often can overlook or diminish the "on-the-ground" realities which enable students to have greater empathy and clarity of "what's at stake."  Considering that this latest so-called "Gaza War" has brought into sharp focus various accusations and apologetics, and teaching sterile theoretical and legal frameworks may not reveal the "lived experiences" of participants, we need to consider pedagogical alternatives. 

Thus, given both the present situation in the AIC (in Israel-Palestine but also in the international arena) and this symposium's theme of precarity, this presentation advocates integrating material culture, food studies and culinary arts, and environmental studies approaches to the conflict.  Inspired by LS colleagues and events, drawing from these fields reveals a new/interesting pedagogy to engage students (anyone, actually) when teaching the AIC.  In addressing actual material aspects of what is typically called "food insecurity" (easily dubbed "precarity"), and the nutritional, material, and environmental needs of any people (Israeli or Palestinian), can enable student empathy with these peoples.  That is, when we hear terms like "conflict," "occupation," "struggle over land," or "national culture," what does that actually mean from the "bottom-up"?  How does that manifest within the quotidian?  These approaches can also augment so-called "larger" political, legal, and ethical debates.  Finally, an interesting aspect of this kind of pedagogy is it highlights, in very easily discernible detail, inherent dialectical processes within the so-called AIC.

Keywords: Pedagogy, Technology and Learning, Public Engagement, Podcasts, Global Citizenship

Faculty are invited  to create multimedia response such as short videos, audio pieces, or photo essays based on their own field research experiences in Prague. By using creative formats to interpret observations, interviews, or site visits, faculty can explore how multimedia can enrich reflection, deepen analysis, and help form new insights into place-based or experiential inquiry.

Keywords: Curriculum, Rousseau, Underground, Violence, Europe

What does it mean to globalize our curriculum in an age of authoritarianism’s return to the European playbooks of 18th-century colonialism and 20th-century fascism?  Having taught the “Social Contract” in the Global Works and Society sequence since 2010, I would like to share how my pedagogical framing of Rousseau has changed in response to the precarity created by contemporary right-wing populism and authoritarianism.  My presentation will advance two curricular arguments: 1. Centering violence (both epistemic and real) affords us an opportunity to complicate the local/global and colonizer/colonized dichotomies; and 2. Expanding “Global Cultures” to include a course on “European Cultures” affords us a chance to contribute to the deprovincialization of Europe.

Rousseau’s “Social Contract” is a rant against slavery in all its forms from nature to politics, religion, finance, and emotion—except race, today’s dominant marker of slavery.  Rousseau was no abolitionist; the French Revolution no anti-colonial struggle. It took the slave rebellion in Saint Domingue and Jean Baptiste Belley’s treacherous voyage across the Atlantic for the French to abolish slavery in 1794.

I started teaching the “Social Contract” by placing it within the local/global context of the European Enlightenment and the Haitian Revolution. Juxtaposing Kant and Rousseau allowed me to put a spotlight on the diversity of Enlightenment prescriptions for political change from “reform” (Kant) to “revolution” (Rousseau).  I then “globalized” Rousseau by putting a spotlight on how his ideas traveled back and forth across the Atlantic.

Recently, I replaced Kant’s “What is the Enlightenment?” with Michael Kwass’ “The Global Underground.” Kwass argues that it is the French monarchy’s monopolization of certain consumer goods that led to a moral revolution, turning the smugglers of tobacco and calico from villains to heroes: “At the popular level, the revolution began not with the storming of the Bastille […] but the sacking of the customs gates that encircled the city of Paris.”[1]

While I continue to “globalize” the teaching of the French Revolution in order to critique its disconnect with anti-colonialism, I now put a finer point on structures and cycles of violence.  As the Enlightenment was simultaneously universalist and exclusionary, so was Europe’s violence both internal and external, both local and global. Admired by Hitler, Frederick the Great, was indeed the Prussian militarist who besieged Prague in 1757. He was also the king whose father beat him relentlessly growing up and even forced him to watch the execution of his childhood friend. Treating the war traumas of French and Algerians alike, Frantz Fanon posed the question: “But, at the level of the individual and human rights what is fascism but colonialism at the very heart of traditionally colonialist countries?”[2]

 [1] Michael Kwass, “The Global Underground: Smuggling, Rebellion, and the Origins of the French Revolution,” in S. Desan, L. Hunt, W. Nelson, eds., The French Revolution in Global Perspective (2013), 28. [2] Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (1961), 48.

Keywords: Heritage, Globalization, UNESCO, Nationalism

The UNESCO World Heritage Program has been celebrated as the organization's greatest success and decried, paradoxically, on the one hand as a homogenizing imposition of the “authorized heritage discourse” (Laurajane Smith) by  the prophets of globalization on localities powerless to resist their hegemony and as a fig leaf disguising the pursuit of nationalistic goals by nation-states with little regard either to global or local stake-holders (Marc Askew).

Originating, as so many of the institutions that still structure global interactions, from the horrific destruction of the Second World War, formulated in full consciousness of the dislocations of global urbanization and the progress of environmental degradation, the UNESCO World Heritage Program has from its inception in 1972 embodied the tense relations between the global, the national, the regional, and the local, at once insisting that world heritage sites may be located within a states-party’s territory but essentially belong to the world and leaving the power to nominate sites in the hands of its member states - albeit with the assistance of global NGOs like ICOMOS (The International Council on Monuments and Sites) and the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN).

By analyzing the intricate relations between global, national, regional, and local interests that inform every aspect of the World Heritage program, I will argue that precarity has always characterized the complex dance these entities perform.  The rhetoric around globalization has shifted more fundamentally than the reality.  In some instances, admittedly, the interactions between these stakeholders have been a waltz and at others a slam dance in the mosh pit.  But the pit has always been there.

Keywords: Bohemia, Bohemianism, Discards, Materiality, Value

This paper plays with disjointed and overlapping ideas of Bohemia (the place), bohemianism (the 19th-century socio-cultural movement that celebrated the precariat), and perpetually precarious waste classifications that both create and erase myriad forms of value. Drawing on literature of discard studies, I consider creative borrowings of historic definitions and fluid consequences of shifting global perspectives as these are made manifest in the precarity of geography, of cultural trends, and of relationships with reject materiality.

Keywords: Literary Translation, Creative Writing, Decolonial Literature

In times of crisis—whether due to political instability, war, climate disasters, or forced migration—the storytelling provides a critical space for reclaiming agency, preserving histories, and challenging dominant narratives. Here, I explore how artistic expression, particularly literature and translation, not only documents resistance but actively reshapes global discourses, offering new frameworks for solidarity and subversion. Focusing on feminist and postcolonial literary traditions, particularly in Urdu women’s writing, this paper examines how art functions as testimony and counter-narrative, amplifying personal and collective histories that are often erased by state-controlled or colonial archives. Translation emerges as an essential act of resistance, disrupting linguistic hierarchies and ensuring that politically charged texts reach wider audiences. In a world where neocolonial structures shape knowledge production, literary and artistic collectives create decolonial spaces, challenging Western-centric discourse and expanding the possibilities of representation.

The paper also explores how digital and hybrid art forms—such as multilingual storytelling, multi-disciplinary creative practices, —transform resistance, allowing for new forms of engagement and circulation. In moments of displacement and statelessness, art becomes a site of belonging and healing, offering diasporic and migrant communities a way to reclaim agency and reshape their own narratives. Ultimately, this study argues that in moments of precarity, the arts do not merely document resistance; they actively reframe global landscapes by creating spaces of defiance, solidarity, and radical imagination.

Keywords: Visual, Subversive, Freedom, Conceptual, Resistance

This presentation will share the application of multimodal expressive elements and visual storytelling in the writing classroom to address individual student inconfidence around linguistic adeptness, to manage anxiety around subjects that are cultural taboos or targets of political violence and to help build community within student environments. The talk with look at dominant communication strategies in social media; memes, captioned photographs, and short videos, and look at how these can be the basis of assignments in the writing classroom. While one consequence of including these kinds of assignments is that they help students develop communication strategies for subversive content that will protect them censure, emphasis will also be placed in this talk on the role such express practices can play in developing research methodologies tied to personal philosophy and identity dynamics, activities which are appropriate to students working through a general education curriculum early in their undergraduate experience within any political environment. There will also be a discussion of the role these texts can play in cultivating speculative reasoning, particularly when neologist conceptual exercises and doppelganger explorations are connected to these visual narrative contexts. Achieve personal freedom in express contexts is always difficult to achieve. The present environment, with its instabilities and direct threats, only increases these challenges.

Keywords: Pedagogy, Technology, Global Citizenship

Technology plays a pivotal role in both accelerating globalization and exacerbating crises, from the COVID-19 pandemic to the escalating challenges of climate change. This presentation explores how the Liberal Studies course "Science of Technology" engages students with the concept of global citizenship in a world that is increasingly interconnected yet fragile. By examining the dynamic relationship between technological advancements and global challenges, students are encouraged to develop a deeper understanding of their responsibilities as global citizens.

Drawing connections to Prague— a city historically situated at the crossroads of science, technology, and society— I will highlight examples of how technological innovation has shaped culture and society throughout time. I will then present a concept for a collaborative video project in which students investigate a real-world issue through the lenses of basic science and technology. This project aims to inspire students to critically examine the opportunities and challenges of living in an era marked by both unprecedented technological advancement and urgent global crises, and to appreciate how a deeper understanding of science can enhance their capacity to engage meaningfully with pressing global issues.

This proposal most directly addresses the following question from the Call: 

To what extent can teaching and research across the academic disciplines develop and instill values of responsible global citizenship, from sustainable use of natural resources to respect for the environment and commitment to eradication of global inequalities?

Keywords: Poetry, Resistance, Artistic Practice, Creative Practice

A seemingly simple practice, redacting--selections of found text--creates narratives of resistance. Rooted in activism, erasure poetry, also known as blackout poetry, is an artistic practice that subverts dominant narratives and flips power imbalances. What emerges are agitators for change, for disobedience, for justice. Urgent voices, no longer from the margins, no longer meek, no longer forgotten, arise. This piece examines how resistance persists and endures through erasure poetry by Nicole Sealey, Tracy K. Smith, Reginald Dwayne Betts, Grace H. Zhou, No’u Revilla, Henry Wei Leung, among others. It offers methods of incorporating erasure poetry in our teaching, research, and creative practice. And it explores how we innovate and subvert through acts of erasure, and activate students to develop their own agency and creative practice. 

Keywords: Pedagogy, Writing, Diversity

As seemingly larger cohorts of international Core and Global Liberal Studies students matriculate through Liberal Studies, student writing has become one of the more complicated sites of global activity available for us to consider. It is a place where languages, cultures, and both individual and collective voices meet the sometimes (and in some but not all cases, understandably) rigid expectations of scholarly writing. Even unilingual students may, in their writing, find themselves in precariously liminal positions between colloquial and formal expression, between knowing and not knowing, and/or between their expectations and those of their professors and peers. Student writing can be an especially dynamic and readily observable form of globalism and its biases and inequities, but it is nonetheless often regarded merely as a fairly reliable, standardized tool for the analysis and development of arguments about other, presumably more important forms of globalism. This paper will examine the various forms of precarity and globalism (global precarity? precarious globality?) evident in student writing, whether in terms of multilingualism, multiculturalism, interdisciplinarity, or epistemology. It will also explore the ways in which the conventions of student and scholarly writing may or may not require updating to meet the writing challenges faced by a diverse body of students whose languages, cultures, and experiences too often find little accommodation in conventional expectations of student and scholarly writing. The paper’s motivating question is this: How do the conventions of scholarly writing fare on the rugged, variable, and in many ways unknowable terrain of Liberal Studies students’ cultural, linguistic, social, and technological experience?

Keywords: Thirty Years War, Theater, Bertolt Brecht, War's Devastation

The Thirty Years War started with the famous “Defenestration of Prague” in 1618 when Czech Protestant nobles threw four Catholic regents out of a window. When it ended with the 1648 Treaty of Westphalia, “in Prague,” according to a historian, “the clanging of church bells drowned the last thunders of the cannon.” During the intervening thirty years, the thunders of cannon had convulsed Central Europe in immense devastation and death from war, famine and disease. The war’s financing also produced global immiseration: fierce contests over European colonial possessions in the East & West Indies, and expansion of the slave trade.

My paper’s subject, however, isn’t the War itself, but the setting it provides for German playwright Bertolt Brecht’s 1939 play "Mother Courage and Her Children." Written immediately after German forces invaded Poland, as Europe trembled precariously on the brink of another catastrophic war, it presents the pitiless precarity of human lives and values in the battlefields of the Thirty Years war. The central character, Mother Courage, drags her three children and her wagon, selling provisions to soldiers, witnessing and participating in war’s destruction and debasement, profiting from it, but ultimately losing all her children. I will discuss the difficulties of teaching Mother Courage: the complicated historical background; the play's implacable vision, absence of sentimentality, shredded morality. Even the ending’s singular heroic act offers bleak consolation – a few lives saved; but a noble effort too precarious to survive.

Keywords: Pedagogy, Technology and Learning, Public Engagement, Professional Networks, Podcasts, Global Citizenship

This session introduces a short-form video assignment on the theme of precarity, in which students transform interviews, observations, and personal narratives into multimedia essays. Faculty will have the opportunity to try out the assignment themselves and explore how it could be adapted for use in courses that emphasize primary research, public engagement, or experiential learning.

The session will address curricular and instructional design considerations, including project scaffolding, ethical practices in documentation, and strategies for assessment. We will also demonstrate how Adobe Express, a user-friendly multimedia platform available through NYU, enables students to create and share short videos without requiring advanced technical skills.

By centering student voices and lived experiences, this assignment fosters critical reflection on how structural and everyday forms of precarity intersect with broader cultural, political, and economic dynamics. The session will invite discussion on the pedagogical potential of short-form video as a flexible, accessible tool for global engagement and multimodal learning.

Keywords: Pedagogy, Global Citizenship, Immigration

Robert Towne, the American screenwriter best known for the 1974 neo-noir Chinatown—which itself touches upon some of the uncomfortable realities of immigration/immigrant communities in the US, however subsidiarily—used the term “ruthless efficiency” to describe the utility of iconic Hollywood actors such as Gary Cooper and Henry Fonda. A short close-up on the landscapes of their faces, Towne said, could communicate a multiplicity of themes in just a few seconds. A question that occurs to me in our current moment of grave precarity is: how, in the very short fourteen weeks that we have with students, can my classes do double-duty, by which I mean how can they teach to write, at the same time that they expose global urgencies and encourage global citizenship? How, to use Towne’s term, can they be ruthlessly efficient? One answer for me has been film, another fiction (and/or creative nonfiction). In my presentation, I’d like to point to some of the works I’ve used in writing classes (The Edge of Heaven, Fatih Akin (GRD-TUR, 2007); Cabaret, Bob Fosse (US, 1972), The Face: Strangers on a Pier, Tash Aw (2016), “American Express,” James Salter), and suggest, in the time allotted, how one or another has been ruthlessly efficient. Currently I’m working with Cabaret, a story set in the “divinely” decadent nightclub life of 1930s Berlin. Its 124 minutes of film-time evoke, among other things, issues of hedonism vs civic responsibility, gender fluidity, sexism in the entertainment industry, sexual tourism, the rise of fascism, the rise of anti-semitism, the visual palettes and thematic concerns of artists of the Weimar Republic. But it’s not just the multiplicity of themes that makes Cabaret ruthlessly efficient; it’s the way its story and its characters connect with our students. That connection makes the abstract concrete. If you recall, at the end of Chinatown, the protagonist is advised to abandon his search for truth, and for justice. The odds are against him, the stakes too high. This is not the ending we want for our students, hence the urgency.

Keywords: Law, Politics, Conflict, Human Rights, Governance

Recent years have seen significant backlash against global governance mechanisms including the United Nations, the World Health Organization, and the international human rights treaties. Many countries that were instrumental in the creation of these global frameworks now refuse to recognize their authority, implementing nationalist policies that are detrimental to the global community and hinder global cooperation. Others criticize these frameworks for their inability to address acute humanitarian crises and disruptions of the global order, such as Russia's invasion of Ukraine. 

This presentation will reflect upon how we can research and teach global governance in this era of disenchantment and disengagement. It will advocate for scholars to think, write, and teach about the ways global governance shapes everyday life. Institutions and legal frameworks of global governance might be best known for their failures to prevent wars and other humanitarian catastrophes, but they equally shape daily life: from the food people eat to the ways local governments operate. Disavowing a crisis-ridden view of global governance allows us to understand the desirable and undesirable ways in which it shapes everyday, local lives. 

This paper speaks to the conference theme because Backlash against global governance is a cause and symptom of precarity. Crises such as war, food insecurity, and pandemics highlight the inability of these mechanisms to deliver on their core promises of global peace, security, and stability. At the same time, the diminishing authority and legitimacy of global governance mechanisms encourages violations of global norms and decreases the scope for global cooperation.