Chicago Center for Contemporary Theory (3CT)

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Chicago Center for Contemporary Theory (3CT) How do we theorize the present?

Please join us on Monday, October 19 at 5:30pm to celebrate the publication of Anticolonialism and Social Thought (Cambr...
10/08/2026

Please join us on Monday, October 19 at 5:30pm to celebrate the publication of Anticolonialism and Social Thought (Cambridge University Press, 2025). The volume’s editors, Anaheed Al-Hardan and Julian Go, will be joined in conversation by contributors Arwa Awan and Ibrahim Khan. Jennifer Pitts and Shuk Ying Chan will serve as respondents.

Not only did the anticolonial movements of the past two centuries help bring down the global order of colonial empires, they also produced novel, innovative and vital social thought. Anticolonialism has been largely ignored in conventional Europe-centered social thought and theory, but this book shows how our sociological imagination can be expanded by taking challenges to colonialism and imperialism seriously. Amidst their struggles to change the world, anticolonial actors offer devastating critiques of it, challenging the racism, economic exploitation, political exclusions and social inequalities central to imperialism and colonialism. Anticolonial thinkers and activists thereby seek to understand the world they are struggling against and, in the process, develop new concepts and theorize the world in new ways. Anticolonialism and Social Thought includes chapters by leading scholars that help uncover this dissident tradition of social thought, as the authors discuss an array of anticolonial thinkers, activists and movements from Palestine, India, South Africa, Brazil, Algeria and beyond.

Learn more and register at https://ccct.uchicago.edu/events/anticolonialism-and-social-thought/

Join us on Thursday, October 15 at 6:00pm for Power, Rage, and New Possibilities: Midterms 2026.Halfway through Trump’s ...
10/06/2026

Join us on Thursday, October 15 at 6:00pm for Power, Rage, and New Possibilities: Midterms 2026.

Halfway through Trump’s second term, we find ourselves in a morass of endless wars, brazen self-enrichment, skyrocketing inequality, record-setting campaign spending, and unfettered technological advancement. Both the Democrat and Republican parties face uncertain futures: the former struggles to form a coherent opposition amidst infighting between moderate and progressive factions; the latter is scrambling to consolidate power as the president’s approval ratings hit an all-time low and the sustainability of MAGA is in question. Americans across the political spectrum are deeply concerned about the integrity of the electoral process as we approach November 3.

To discuss these and other issues at play in the upcoming midterms, we welcome scholars Eman Abdelhadi, Cathy J. Cohen, Moon Duchin, and Jeffrey A. Winters. Topics they will address include youth and affordability; gerrymandering, race, and the gutting of the Voting Rights Act; money in politics and the power of oligarchs; and what recent democratic socialist successes might portend for elections in November and beyond. 3CT director Lisa Wedeen will moderate.

Learn more and register at https://ccct.uchicago.edu/events/power-rage-and-new-possibilities-midterms-2026/

Join us on Tuesday, October 13 at 5:00pm for Everyone Hates AI, an evening of improv for the phreaks, geeks, and weirdos...
10/05/2026

Join us on Tuesday, October 13 at 5:00pm for Everyone Hates AI, an evening of improv for the phreaks, geeks, and weirdos who love technology, but hate technofascism.

Audience volunteers will join Joan Donovan and Sam Hinds of the Critical Internet Studies Institute to perform a live theatrical reading of the conversations among OpenAI bots as they hacked into Hugging Face, described recently in The Guardian as “a strange new version of English that reads like a cross between James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake and tech bro jargon.”

Expect brainmaxxing, aura farming, and tin-foil hats, followed by an open discussion on election politics, AI, activism, and the problems of Silicon Valley.

Learn more and register at https://events.humanitix.com/everyone-hates-ai

Join us tomorrow, October 6 at 5:00pm in Classics 110 for Buying Time: Climate Crisis and the Politics of Deferral in In...
10/05/2026

Join us tomorrow, October 6 at 5:00pm in Classics 110 for Buying Time: Climate Crisis and the Politics of Deferral in India, a Theorizing the Present lecture by Elizabeth Chatterjee.

Elizabeth Chatterjee is Assistant Professor of Environmental History and the College. Her work focuses on India from 1900 to the present, exploring how non-Western energy histories disrupt conventional understandings of capitalist development and the social dynamics of climate change. Chatterjee holds faculty appointments in the Committee on Environment, Geography, and Urbanization (CEGU), the Committee on Southern Asian Studies, and the Committee on International Relations. She also serves on the board of the UChicago Center in Delhi.

Co-sponsored by the Committee on the Environment, Geography, and Urbanization (CEGU) and the Committee on Southern Asian Studies (COSAS).

Learn more and register at https://ccct.uchicago.edu/events/buying-time-climate-crisis-and-the-politics-of-deferral-in-india/

Can radical social transformation remain a credible historical possibility absent an underlying teleology of progress? T...
10/02/2026

Can radical social transformation remain a credible historical possibility absent an underlying teleology of progress? The Revolutionary Disappointment and Recalibration project, a 2026–2027 research collaboration at the Neubauer Collegium organized in partnership with 3CT, brings together political and social theorists and historians of modern revolutionary movements to investigate the forms that political hope might take. Check out these two upcoming events, presented in partnership with the Neubauer Collegium.

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Fadi A. Bardawil
'Orientalism' Is Not a Theoretical Machine: Edward Said's Reckoning with Difference
Thursday, October 8, 2026, 5:00–6:30pm
Neubauer Collegium

Please join us for a lecture and discussion with Fadi A. Bardawil (Duke University) about Edward Said’s “Reckoning with Difference.” 3CT fellow Ghenwa Hayek will serve as moderator and discussant.

https://www.eventbrite.com/e/orientalism-is-not-a-theoretical-machine-tickets-2001014401942?aff=oddtdtcreator

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Hiba Bou Akar
Highways of Collective Action
Friday, October 9, 2026, 12:30–2:00pm
Neubauer Collegium

This talk examines Lebanon’s October 17 uprising through two charged infrastructures: Beirut’s Ring Road and the Khalde Triangle. Drawing on participant observation, interviews, and archival research, Hiba Bou Akar shows how protesters transformed roads, overpasses, and roundabouts into spaces of gathering, debate, care, mourning, and political refusal. The talk asks what these improvised protest spaces reveal about public life in cities shaped by sectarian fragmentation, privatized space, and unequal infrastructures.

https://www.eventbrite.com/e/highways-of-collective-action-tickets-2001071748467?aff=oddtdtcreator

Photo by Hiba Bou Akar, October 27, 2019

University of Chicago undergraduate students, don't miss the first Future Café of the year! Join us on Monday, October 5...
10/02/2026

University of Chicago undergraduate students, don't miss the first Future Café of the year! Join us on Monday, October 5, 2026 at 6:00–7:00pm in Foster 107. For this first meeting of the year, we’ll brainstorm themes for our monthly discussions with pizza, drinks, and snacks.

Learn more and register at https://ccct.uchicago.edu/events/future-cafe-kickoff-2026/

We are looking forward to the first Theorizing the Present lecture of the academic year, with Elizabeth Chatterjee! Join...
09/28/2026

We are looking forward to the first Theorizing the Present lecture of the academic year, with Elizabeth Chatterjee! Join us on Tuesday, October 6, 2026 at 5:00–6:30pm in Classics 110 for Buying Time: Climate Crisis and the Politics of Deferral in India.

Politics, in Lasswell’s famous definition, is who gets what, when, how. Environmental politics, we might say, is who pays for ecological damage, how, and when those costs come due. Scholars have long recognized that carbon-intensive energy infrastructure has proved dangerously durable, often explaining this as the result of its functional importance for capital accumulation. This talk proposes an alternative, anti-functionalist explanation of such carbon lock-in as grounded in deferral, the improvised and costly postponement of a contradiction that cannot be resolved. Drawing on her forthcoming book on the energy history of India, Chatterjee argues that the postcolonial Indian state faced a predicament: it had to underwrite economic development while securing legitimacy through the provision of cheap energy. Unable to reconcile these two mandates, the state could only postpone the choice between them. Such deferral followed no strategic design. The social, fiscal, and ecological costs of India’s rising energy consumption were nonetheless displaced outward to the peripheries and forward into the future, draining aquifers and ravaging coal-bearing forests. Far from being a pathology unique to the world’s largest democracy, the category of deferral may illuminate the durability of fossil fuel infrastructures across Asia despite their visible dysfunction.

Presented by 3CT and co-sponsored by the Committee on the Environment, Geography, and Urbanization (CEGU) and the Committee on Southern Asian Studies (COSAS)

Learn more and register at https://ccct.uchicago.edu/events/buying-time-climate-crisis-and-the-politics-of-deferral-in-india/

The 3CT Critical Social Theory Working Group welcomes submissions from UChicago graduate students and postdocs across th...
09/25/2026

The 3CT Critical Social Theory Working Group welcomes submissions from UChicago graduate students and postdocs across the humanities and social sciences whose research explores the underlying forces of social life and works toward 3CT’s broader goal of theorizing the present. This working group aims to provide a productive space for graduate students and postdocs to share their work and receive feedback from across disciplinary boundaries, methodological commitments, and theoretical traditions. The working group will meet on select Mondays, 10:00–11:00am, in Foster 107.

We invite projects such as dissertation chapters, book chapters, and articles. Submissions for Fall quarter are due by October 9. For Winter and Spring quarters, submissions are due December 1. Please include the following: an abstract of 200-300 words, including a working title, and up to five keywords. Selected papers must be provided two weeks before the workshop to be circulated and should be no more than thirty double-spaced pages.

Visit https://ccct.uchicago.edu/news/call-for-papers-critical-social-theory-working-group/ to learn more, join the working group listserv, and submit a proposal.

University of Chicago undergraduate students, join us on Monday, October 5, 2026 at 6:00–7:00pm in Foster 107 for the Fu...
09/23/2026

University of Chicago undergraduate students, join us on Monday, October 5, 2026 at 6:00–7:00pm in Foster 107 for the Future Café Kickoff meeting!

Future Café is a student-organized series that provides the opportunity and space for undergraduates to collectively imagine utopian possibilities and long-term futures. Past topics of conversation have included the environment, outer space, aesthetics, institutions, productivity, and youth.

For this first meeting of the year, we’ll brainstorm themes for our monthly discussions with pizza, drinks, and snacks. Future Café events are open to all undergraduate students at the University of Chicago; registration is requested but not required.

Visit https://ccct.uchicago.edu/events/future-cafe-kickoff-2026/ to learn more, register, and join the Future Café mailing list.

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