Event
Wolf Humanities Center Forum on Revolution
Join the Wolf Humanities Center Forum as these diverse thinkers, artists, and activists delve into the connections between revolution, time, and societal shifts in a symposium that explores how our present moment challenges traditional ideas of progress.
What is the relationship between revolution—as the tipping point of a project that ushers a new order—and our lived experience of time? How does the unique temporality of revolution, as a disruption followed by a taking of accounts, compel convictions that transform intimate and individual projects into shared investments and collective commitments? As genocidal warfare, mass incarceration, climate catastrophes, and global inequality increasingly become normalized aspects of everyday life, societies everywhere have experienced the formidable organizing of movements demanding social change and institutions of all kinds that sustain themselves by suppressing and coercing new potentials. In other words, we live in a contemporary moment that alternates between revolution and impasse.
How can the humanities help us make sense of this peculiar oscillation that rips apart ideal conceptions of linear progress, ever more urgent given the violence implied by its ongoing movement? In this multidisciplinary symposium, scholars, artists, and activists will come together to reflect on how the time of revolution and impasse disrupts neat boundaries between past, present, and future.