Join us for a screening of the film Cactus Pears (2025, dir. Rohan Kanawade), followed by a conversation with Fania Noël and Sandeep Bashki.

Moderated by Dr. Sedef Ozoguz, Assistant Professor of Liberal Arts in Psychology.

Light refreshments will be served.

ABOUT THE FILM: Anand, a 30-something city dweller compelled to spend a 10-day mourning period for his father in the rugged countryside of western India, tenderly bonds with a local farmer struggling to stay unmarried. 

ABOUT THE SCREENING SERIES: 

Presented by SexTech Lab in collaboration with the Philosophy Film Club and Ruff Cuts, the screening series is an interdepartmental, cross-disciplinary initiative that engages with film as an intellectual and cultural work to be discussed, debated, and thought with. The series draws on New York City’s extraordinary density of critics, journalists, artists, filmmakers, and public scholars in our orbit, bringing them into dialogue with internal experts at The New School, moderated by students across departments and programs. Each event pairs a screening with dialogue that approaches cinema through historical, philosophical, political, and psychological lenses, showing how public debate, academic inquiry, and applied industry insight can sharpen one another.

Underpinned by The SexTech Labs' focus on intimacy, technology, and equity, the series will be curated each term around university-wide themes of Democracy and Culture, Technology, City Initiatives, and Climate and Environmental Justice, ensuring the program remains coherent, timely, and institutionally relevant.

ABOUT THE GUEST SPEAKERS: 

Fania Noël is a Black feminist sociologist and writer. She is currently a Visiting Research Scholar in Political and Social Theory at the Center for Place, Culture, and Politics at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (CUNY) and will soon join New York University’s Remarque Institute as a Fellow. Her research examines Black leftist politics, cross-racial coalition spaces, and racialized gender in France, as well as gendered racialization representation in popular visual culture. Her forthcoming book, In the Name of the Dead Black Wife: Absenting, Blackness, and Gender in Contemporary Science Fictions, will be published by the University of Illinois Press. It examines how mainstream science fiction mobilizes and excises Black women within post-racial imaginaries, positioning them in ways that disavow racial violence while sustaining Blackness as a structuring force and facilitating the redemption of whiteness and Black masculinity. Her work has appeared in Ethnic and Racial Studies, Kohl: A Journal for Body and Gender Research, and ASAP Review, with additional work forthcoming in Contemporary French Civilization. She received the 2025 Feminist Scholar-Activist Award from the American Sociological Association’s Sex and Gender Section. She authored several books in French on Black feminist thought and politics, most recently 10 Questions sur les féminismes noirs (Libertalia, 2024).

Sandeep Bakshi (he/they) researches on transnational queer and decolonial enunciation of knowledges. He received his PhD from the School of English, University of Leicester, UK, and is currently employed as Associate Professor of Decolonial, Postcolonial and Queer Studies at University Paris Cité. He convened two research seminars, “Peripheral Knowledges” and “Empires, Souths, Sexualities,” (2019-2024) and currently co-convenes the research seminar, “Undiscipline, Decolonise, Repair”. He leads the Pôle Société Civile of the Cité du Genre Institute, Université Paris Cité. Co-editor of The Sage Handbook of Decolonial Theory (London: Sage, 2025)), Decolonizing Sexualities: Transnational Perspectives, Critical Interventions (Oxford: Counterpress, 2016), ‘Decolonial Trajectories’, special issue of Interventions (2020), and Qu’est-ce que l’Intersectionnalité? Dominations plurielles : sexe, classe et race (2021), he has variously published on queer and race entanglements in postcolonial literatures and cultures. He was a visiting fellow at the Institute of Advanced Studies for Humanities at the University of Edinburgh (2021-2022) and is the co-founder and Co-Director of the Decolonizing Sexualities Network (https://decolonizingsexualities.org). He serves on the Arts and Humanities Career Advisory Group of the Wellcome Trust, London and is a member of the Board of Directors, CLAGS: The Centre for LGBTQ Studies, City University of New York.