What Makes Humanity? Identities, Relationships, and a New Cosmopolitanism
Speakers
CRAIG CALHOUN
University Professor of Social Sciences at Arizona State University. Previously, he was president of the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) and the Social Science Research Council (SSRC). He is author of Neither Gods Nor Emperors: Students and the Struggle for Democracy in China (1997), Degenerations of Democracy (2022) and the forthcoming Cosmopolitanism and Belonging: From European Integration to Global Hopes and Fears.
ACHILLIE MBEMBE
Research Professor of History and Politics at the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research in Johannesburg, South Africa and Professor at the European Graduate School. He is author of On the Postcolony (2001), Critique of Black Reason (2016), Necropolitics(2019), and Out of the Dark Night: Essays on Decolonization (2020).
DAVID A. PALMER
Professor jointly at the Hong Kong Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences and in the Department of Sociology at the University of Hong Kong. He is co-author of The Religious Question in Modern China (2010) and Dream Trippers: Global Daoism and the Predicament of Modern Spirituality (2017), and author of Qigong Fever: Body, Science and Utopia in China (2007).
Moderators:
SHAHRZAD SABET
Shahrzad Sabet is Co-Director of the Center on Modernity in Transition (COMIT) and a Fellow at New York University’s Institute for Public Knowledge. Her current book project, which spans a variety of disciplines, makes the case for a reimagined universalism that reconciles the oneness and the diversity of humankind.
BENJAMIN SCHEWEL
Benjamin Schewel is Co-Director of the Center on Modernity in Transition (COMIT). He is author of Seven Ways of Looking at Religion (2017) and is currently working on a second book, Encountering the Axial Age, both from Yale University Press.
2021-2022 SPEAKER SERIES
Identity and Belonging in a Global Age
With the rise of tribalism and nationalism throughout the world, questions of collective identity and belonging have surged to prominence in recent years. Across numerous disciplines and discourses, a key dilemma has taken shape: how to reconcile the legitimate yearning for rootedness and locality, with the fluidity and porousness of an increasingly global age. This series brings together leading thinkers from a variety of perspectives to examine and reframe the crises of identity that confront us in a rapidly changing global age, and to think deeply about how humanity might resolve them. Sponsored by the Kenan Institute for Ethics at Duke University, the Institute for Public Knowledge at New York University, and COMIT.
Sponsors
