Unsettling Institutions

This year’s conference is entitled "Unsettling Institutions" and will take place in person on the UMass Amherst Campus in Western Massachusetts, April 18-19, 2025. The keynote address, ""Academic Insurgency: Public Humanities as Resistance," will be given by Roopika Risam, Associate Professor of Film and Media Studies at Dartmouth College.

This conference – inspired by the UMass History Department’s 2024-25 Feinberg Series, “What Are Universities For?” and the Exhibit Design Practicum on Student Activism UMass graduate course's exhibit, "Be Revolutionary: UMass Student Solidarity with Central America in the 1980s"– will bring together an interdisciplinary group of graduate students to consider how bedrock institutions have shaped – and continue to shape– societies, cultures, politics, and our collective lived experiences. How, for example, have institutions constrained the lives of particular groups in the past? How have people responded when institutions have stopped serving their intended purpose? We encourage proposals to engage with the question of how we might connect these topics to modern-day issues of social justice, democracy, and community.

The GHA is pleased to welcome speakers from various disciplines and several different universities in the United States and abroad.

For questions, please reach out to the GHA at ghapage@umass.edu.