2023-24 CGSC Seminar: Speculation
Mid-Career Fellowships Application Now Open

 

Deadline for Applications: Monday, March 6th, 2023, at 12pm
Visit the Mid-Career Faculty Fellowship Call for Applications page for full details.

 

The Committee on Globalization and Social Change invites applications from mid-career CUNY faculty members to participate as fellows in their 2023-24 seminar on Speculation.

This era is characterized by growing uncertainty, ambivalence, anxiety, dread, or anguish about the future. This agonistic relation to what may come is bound up with various types of speculation. We might characterize these as attempts to see (and act in relation to) possibilities that cannot be reliably discerned.

Speculation is a multivalent term that signals all manner of conjecture, whether poetic, philosophical, technocratic, and economic. Poetic speculation is about imagination and fabulation. It conjures alternative realities and fantastic worlds that may be true. Philosophical speculation offers provisional hypotheses and assays provisional conclusions about issues that cannot be empirically verified. It attempts to know what cannot be definitively known. Technocratic and financial speculation are about managing risk by correctly guessing possible outcomes. The former seeks to master uncertainty through prediction, planning, and preparation. The latter seeks to profit from uncertainty by assuming risk and gambling on outcomes. Speculation may insist upon or disavow uncertainty, unknowability, openness, and risk. It may call into question or reaffirm conventional notions of truth. By attempting to see possibilities, speculative conjecture may also create possibilities. The speculative gaze or operation may also be directed at the unknowable past. It may entail conjectures on what might have been. Speculation, in whatever register, may refer to a practice, a disposition, or an orientation. It may point in utopian or dystopian directions. It may be grounded in hopeful idealism, pessimistic realism, or calculative cynicism. It indexes subjective modes of seeing, knowing, naming, anticipating, conjuring, remembering, or creating. Speculation thus has epistemological, socio-political, and temporal ramifications.

CGSC welcomes fellowship applications from mid-career CUNY faculty whose research engages or illuminates some aspect of speculation, whatever the historical period or geographical region.

 

Eligibility & Requirements

Applications are invited from mid-career faculty within the CUNY system working in humanities and humanistic social sciences. Their work may focus on any geographical place and historical period from a variety of analytic perspectives. CGSC is especially interested in theoretically informed scholars—or scholars open to theoretical discussion—whose work relates particular situations to broader processes or problems that may traverse conventional boundaries (i.e., spatial, temporal, cultural, conceptual, disciplinary, etc.).

With generous support from The Graduate Center, CUNY, and the Provost’s Office, successful candidates will be granted two course releases from college teaching requirements, to be distributed across the Fall 2023 and Spring 2024 semesters at their departments’ discretion, in return for a commitment to fully participate in the work of the Committee and in the weekly seminar.

Applicants must be tenured, and preference will be given to faculty who do not yet have the rank of full Professor.

Fellows will be expected to participate in the weekly Committee seminar as well as ongoing lectures and symposia. Committee seminars meet every Tuesday during the semester, from 10:30am to 12:30pm. Barring complications, the meetings will be in the Globalization office suite (room 5109 at the GC). Please note, it is a condition of the fellowship that fellows leave this time free in their teaching schedules.

 

How to Apply Faculty must apply using the 2023-24 Faculty Fellowship Application Form. The application materials should be saved and emailed as a single PDF document and include the following: Signed and completed cover letter (part of the Application Form document) 150-word abstract Project description (maximum 2000 words) and 1-page bibliography A current curriculum vitae (maximum 5 pages)

 

Deadline for Mid-Career Faculty Fellowship Applications: Monday, March 6th, 2023 at 12pm