Dear Colleagues:
We are pleased to announce “Collectives and Commons: Global Histories, Emerging Futures" as the research theme for 2019-20, at the Institute for Historical Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. Please see below and attached information about the
theme. To apply for a residential fellowship, please visit
https://liberalarts.utexas.edu/historicalstudies/fellowships/resident-fellows.php.
The application deadline is January 15, 2019. If it is possible, we would appreciate if you'd share the information below widely with your colleagues and networks. Thank you.
Miriam Bodian
Professor & Director of the Institute for Historical Studies
Department of History
The University of Texas at Austin
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Collectives and Commons: Global Histories, Emerging Futures
Recent years have witnessed a global rise in new forms of socialism, new socialist ideas, and new types of collectives. As seemingly common resources like air and water, public spaces, even ideas, have become privatized, theorists
and activists have sought to reclaim the “commons” and to rethink life in common. Rising social inequality makes the project especially urgent. In response, social activists have been experimenting with local and global forms of collective organization,
while scholars have been investigating the many varied histories of collectivity.
The Institute for Historical Studies welcomes applications from scholars who are re-examining historical collectives, commons, non-capitalist forms of production, and socialisms in all their variety. What variants of non-individualist
and collectivist experimentation have been proposed in the past? What alternative forms of subjectivity, affect, and aesthetics did they produce? How have they conceived in new ways the human-nature relationship? Given that twentieth-century state socialism
revealed a potential for coercion and violence, what alternative conceptions of state sovereignty or of the law have been proposed? How have different cultural traditions led to different conceptualizations of collective social organization?
We invite proposals of historical projects that engage these and other questions pertaining to ideas and practices of collectives, commons, socialisms in all time periods and all parts of the world. We expect to offer two or three
residential fellowships in 2019-2020.
Application deadline: January 15, 2019