Always free and open to the public, the Cultural Studies colloquium has been called a key contributor to the intellectual life of the College of Humanities and Social Sciences. It is designed both to augment students’ vesting in the cultural studies tradition with recent scholarly developments, and to expand knowledge of those developments to an audience at Mason and beyond. Thus the colloquium brings scholars of diverse methodological, theoretical, and topical expertises to Fairfax campus to share influential and innovative interdisciplinary projects--projects that, whether historical or contemporary, aim to generate critical discourse concerning the current moment. Past speakers have included Lauren Berlant; bell hooks; Andrew Ross; Wendy Brown; Cornel West; Gayatri Spivak; Chris Newfield; Alexander Weheliye; Rita Felski; Alexander Galloway; and Nitin Govil.
This Spring, all Colloquium events will be held in-person and online via Zoom
Afterlives of Jim Crow?
In his recent book, The South, Adolph L. Reed Jr. takes up the urgent task of recounting the granular realities of life in the last decades of the Jim Crow South.
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After Black Lives Matter: Policing and Anti-Capitalist Struggle
The historic uprising in the wake of the murder of George Floyd transformed the way Americans and the world think about race and policing. Why did it achieve so little in the way of substantive reforms?
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Doing Cultural Studies in De-globalizing Times: China, Media, and Transpacific Entanglements
This talk draws on my on-going research to rethink a cultural studies approach to the study of media and politics amidst the rhetoric and reality of “de-globalization.”
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The Last Man Takes LSD: Foucault and the End of Revolution
Part intellectual history, part critical theory, The Last Man Takes LSD challenges the way we think about both Michel Foucault and modern progressive politics. Using his acid trip at Zabriskie Point as emblematic of his move from power to the self, this book argues that Foucault contributed to a tectonic shift in the intellectual and political life of the era and its legacy even today.
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The Uses and Abuses of Jim Crow: Contemporary Race Theory and the Problem of History
Dr. Magubane will discuss the ways in which much of contemporary theory misunderstands history—particularly the Jim Crow period—and how that misunderstanding is the source of many critical and conceptual shortcomings.
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