Applications Due: Friday, February 7, 2025 no later than 5:00 p.m.

The application form and instructions can be found here: https://pcp.gc.cuny.edu/fellowships/

The Center for Place, Culture and Politics Faculty Fellowship is open to faculty from any discipline whose research articulates with topics that have contemporary urgency, regardless of period or methodological approach. The Center runs a lively weekly seminar in which we discuss fellows’ work-in-progress. We also host distinguished lecture series and other special programming, and sponsor conferences organized around annual themes.

We invite faculty fellow applicants to provide a statement (1,500 words) on their research that highlights the linkages of their research with the Center’s ongoing interdisciplinary agenda. Kindly note: acceptance of the award is contingent on being able to attend the CPCP’s Wednesday morning (10am-12pm) seminar during the academic year.

Crises of mobility have become a key integer of social struggle in the world system. Whether one considers the explosion of different forms of movement—and the unending state efforts to classify them as deserving or undeserving, as economic, environmental, or asylum-based—or the production of immobility, in carcerality, wagelessness, enclosure, or via the securitization of borders, mobility and its discontents are central to radical activism across local and transnational communities. How do shifts in forms of mobility inform or mediate the conditions of social change? What are the links between transit and transition? Do contemporary logics of mobility, at different scales, temporalities and intensities, represent counter-hegemonic realms of possibility, political imagination, and new ways to think and express transformation?

For the 2025-2026 seminar, CPCP invites applicants to examine mobility and immobility from a wide variety of interdisciplinary approaches. What are the relevant conditions of material change for organizers and scholars? How should we understand mobility: as a way to rethink political economy, as the inevitable undoing of the nation-state, as an ontological condition? What methodologies are adequate to understanding the movement (or not) of people across the planet, and what happens when we broaden the frame to include the things that people move with and against: commodities, capital, viruses, racialized infrastructures, ecologies, abolition imaginaries and practices? The seminar will explore the possible parameters of praxis and the production of knowledge that attends them. How can mobility itself be mobilized?