The 2023 event was organized as a symposium by Postdoctoral Fellows Melanie Abeygunawardana, Megan Finch, and Marianna Hovhannisyan.
University (and) Ruin
The university is the protagonist and antagonists of several competing narratives about the state of the world and its ruin or revitalization. Building upon this year's Pembroke Seminar topic, "In the Afterlives and Aftermaths of Ruin,” this symposium sought to enable conversations across levels of the university and with the incredibly generative work and presences of CUNY Graduate Center Professors Amber Jamilla Musser and Kandice Chuh about the university as potentially, in both positive and negative ways, ruined as well as ruinous. Moreover, the symposium asked participants to actively think and publicly engaged with their own structural and affective relationships to the university and their own, potentially ruinous, desires within and for it.