ABOUT

This transnational collaboration joins the University College London and Yale University in a collective study of the longue durée of colonial racial capitalism and its expression in the contemporary moment in which cruel austerity measures deepen economic dispossession and authoritarian states subject the poor, unhoused, and most vulnerable to state violence, ethnonationalism, incarceration, and death. We ask about the endurance of the unreckoned colonial past in these present conditions and extrapolate possibilities for contestation. We assess the adequacy and limitations of existing political languages and disciplinary knowledge frames for understanding this relationship of colonial conditions in the present, and consider interdisciplinary studies as not simply the combination of multiple methods or objects, but more significantly, as the interrogation of disciplinary knowledge productions and the state and social order they uphold. Finally, we ask what other objects, practices, and questions might be mobilized to disrupt the closure of current frames and bring forward other ways of understanding this longue durée?

ORGANIZERS

Gargi Bhattacharyya
Director, Sarah Parker Remond Centre, University College London

Lisa Lowe
Samuel Knight Professor of American Studies, Yale University

PROGRAM

22 October 2025 
12:00 pm EDT / 5:00 pm BST
Gargi Bhattacharyya 
Lecture: “Geopolitics and Catastrophe” 

23 October 2025 
12:00 pm EDT / 5:00 pm BST
Gargi Bhattacharyya 
Seminar: Geopolitics and Catastrophe

11 February 2026 
12:00 pm EST / 5:00 pm GMT
Lisa Lowe
Lecture: “Colonial Histories of the Present”

12 February 2026 
12:00 pm EST / 5:00 pm GMT
Lisa Lowe
Seminar: “Education, Reproduction, Enclosure”

9 April 2026 
12:00 pm EDT / 5:00 pm GMT
Laleh Khalili
Lecture: “Extractive Capitalism”

10 April 2026 
12:00 pm EDT / 5:00 pm GMT
Laleh Khalili
Seminar: “Extractive Capitalism”