2023 - The Poltical Life of Scale
2023 - The Poltical Life of Scale
Scale: A Seminar in Urban Humanities

Scale: A Seminar in Urban Humanities

Seminar 2022/2023
Scale: A Seminar in Urban Humanities

Scale: A Seminar in Urban Humanities

Seminar 2022/2023
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This CCA seminar explores how we think scale across the urban humanities in the twenty-first century: how do writers, artists, architects, geographers, and theorists use scale to reimagine the urban? What work does scale perform as referent, tool, index, and horizon? What pressures does it apply to how we understand and shape urban communities, the idea of the urban, and how artistic expression informs new urban possibilities and lived experience? How do the flexible orientations and relationships that scale leverages allow us to envision new forms of the urban, the political, and the quotidian? What are the spatial and temporal scales of belonging and memory in the modern urban? How do diverse, fluid, and dynamic scalar imaginaries allow us to live locally within larger global and planetary contexts as well as in present historical moments that also engage deep time? What, in short, is the current state of scale and what is its urban future?

During the academic year 2022-2023, seminar participants will come together to consider how scale shapes new reading and mapping practices, our measure and experience of the city, ways of configuring the localism of the global city, modes of urban belonging and home, understandings of sustainability and ecocatastrophe, and contemporary memorial practices and deathways. We will hear from leading artists, practitioners, and scholars, and will share and refine our own works-in-progress in an open, collaborative, and on-going dialogue with other members of the seminar. We will also, over the course of our year together, try our hands at various scalar technologies and projects that will enhance how we think the application, purpose, and future of scale as fulcrum for new knowledge production across the diverse and evolving urban humanities.  

Become a Fellow

The Center for Cultural Analysis is accepting applications for fellowships for Rutgers faculty and Rutgers graduate students, and two Postdoctoral Associate positions for external scholars.

Faculty fellows will receive funding for a course release from their home departments, generally up to $5000. Graduate fellows will receive a $23,000 stipend, up to three credits in tuition remission, and health benefits (through the Graduate School), but they may not hold any other teaching positions, long-term fellowships, or administrative appointments during their CCA year. Postdoctoral Associates will receive a $50,000 salary, health benefits, and a private office in the new Rutgers Academic Building on the College Avenue campus. During the course of the academic year, Postdoctoral Associates teach one undergraduate course in a relevant Department within SAS, which is arranged through the CCA. Since the CCA Postdoctoral Associate position is considered a residential appointment, candidates must agree to establish residency within a forty mile radius of the New Brunswick campus during the duration of their appointment.

All seminar participants will have access to the CCA’s resources and will be expected to participate in and to present their work during CCA seminars, which meet regularly throughout the academic year.

How to become a Fellow

 

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