Institute for the Humanities, UIC

Tomorrow is the last day to register (go.uic.edu/carcerallib) for our symposium on Carceral Liberalism In An Age of Fascism! Here's a sneak peak of what to expect:

9:30-11:00: Radical arts and encounters with carceral liberalism
11:30-1:15: Chicago under occupation
1:30-2:45: Envisioning alternative futures
3:00-5:00: Screening of The Encampments

Join UIC faculty in conversation with Dylan Rodriguez, Rod Ferguson, Lisa Bhungalia, Antonio Gutierrez, Rey Wences, Martine Caverl, Damon Williams, Joey Mogul, Rev. David Black, and more. Featuring art from the Just Seeds Collective, No New Prisons campaign, and Mary Hazboun.

Lunch will be provided.

We have an exciting lineup for our March 10 symposium on Carceral Liberalism in an Age of Fascism, including a special screening of The Encampments, a documentary film about the student movement to cut university ties to the war on Gaza.

🔗 Register here: linktr.ee/uic_ifth! If you already registered for the symposium, you do not have to register for the screening.

Join the UIC Institute for the Humanities, the Social Justice Initiative, the Arab American Cultural Center, and Global Middle East Studies for a free film screening tracing mobilizations that spread to hundreds of campuses across the U.S., where students organized encampments to make their voices heard.

Join us for Dr. Justin Quang Nguyên Phan's faculty fellow lecture this Thursday at the Institute!

Thi Bui’s widely acclaimed graphic novel, The Best We Could Do: An Illustrated Memoir, follows her family’s lives as people who were made refugees in the wake of the Vietnam War, tracing memories and histories that thread back and well after the events of that war. This talk analyzes Bui’s novel as a form of refugee knowledge production that de-romanticizes multiple sites of diasporic gathering, whether the home, the family, refuge, or nation. Bui’s artistic decisions provide a generative way to craft Vietnamese refugee narratives anew—what Phan calls an aesthetics of embodied nonalignment—by re/aligning themselves with a diasporic, anti-imperial vision for self-determination, liberation, and freedom.

As an interdisciplinary scholar, Dr. Phan’s current book project demonstrates how Vietnamese and Vietnamese diasporic art unsettle dominant Cold War, colonial, and postcolonial nationalist depictions of Vietnam in order to advance a diasporic genealogy of nonalignment.

As the world confronts fascism, authoritarianism, imperialism, and genocide, the UIC Institute for the Humanities is bringing together scholars, organizers, and artists to address the limitations of liberal responses. Join us on March 10 for day-long programming to answer the questions: can liberal cities and institutions protect vulnerable communities from repression? What can be done to push beyond carceral liberalism and center the humanity of the most vulnerable?

Register before March 4 here: go.uic.edu/carcerallib