2025 Fellow at the Institute for Critical Social Inquiry

This summer I was thrilled participate as a Fellow at the Institute for Critical Social Inquiry (ICSI), June 8-14, 2025, at The New School, New York. Founded by scholar Ann Laura Stoler, the annual ICSI provides opportunities to engage in an immersive one-week seminar with distinguished thinkers on a topic relevant to contemporary social inquiry. Thanks to generous support from Tyler School of Art & Architecture in the form of the Dean’s Summer Residency fund and the Marcia Hall Research Award, I participated in Prof. Homi K. Bhabha’s seminar, “Systematic and Traumatic: Agonisms of Racial Injury and Social Justice," with a remarkable cohort of doctoral candidates, early career faculty, artists and other researchers (pictured below).

ICSI 2025 Fellow cohort with Professor Homi K. Bhabha at The New School.

Prof. Bhabha’s seminar related directly to the second chapter of my dissertation, “Healing Institutions: Redressing Museums and Biomedicine in Contemporary Art.” The chapter considers the ongoing injuriousness of ethnographic and other racializing photography of the 19th century and how contemporary artists attempt to redress and heal such photographic wounds in the 21st century. In the seminar, participants were invited into close conversation and reading with Homi as he developed his conceptual framework of “systemic” and “traumatic” timescales of racial injury. Exploring how time, injury and healing interface together introduced new and exciting possibilities for my theoretical toolkit, which was substantially enriched by participation in ICSI.