Words like race, class, gender are the common terms that shape our identities and communities both inside the university and out. Deva Woodly, the founding director of the Mellon Initiative for Inclusive Faculty Excellence, suggested that these terms are often used to frame the world in ways that serve the interests of power. Instead, Woodly argued that we need to make use of these terms to re-envision “the world as it is,” showing how terms like race, class, and gender, are used to distort our experience of the world rather than simply describing it. These common terms can be reclaimed as ideas that speak to the inalienable importance of equality, diversity, and community at the heart of the political project of our time. The values and commitments that ground the Mellon Initiative are not merely aspirational, but actually speak to the world as it is, unfettered by the deliberately distorted vision of power in the hands of the few. The work of the Mellon Initiative is to foster community and scholarship, recognizing that reinforcing these connections - both within the university and between the university and the communities that intersect and surround it - means also reinforcing the transformative potential of the terms we hold in common and a vision of a shared future.
“The World as It Is: Celebrating Collective Transformation” showcases and celebrates the work fostered and generated over the last four years as a culmination of the Mellon Initiative for Inclusive Faculty Excellence.
For program details, please scroll below.
Click here to view the schedule and registration for Day 2.
Presented by Mellon Initiative for Inclusive Faculty Excellence at The New School.
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Deva is an Associate Professor of Politics at the New School. She is the author of The Politics of Common Sense: How Social Movements Use Public Discourse to Change Politics and Win Acceptance (Oxford 2015) and Reckoning: #BlackLivesMatter and the Democratic Necessity of Social Movements (Oxford, 2021). She has also held fellowships at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton as well as the Edmund J. Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard. Her research covers a variety of topics, from media and communication, to political understandings of economics, to race and imagination, to social movements. In each case, she focuses on the impacts of public discourse on the political understandings of social and economic issues as well as how those common understandings change democratic practice and public policy. Her process of inquiry is inductive, moving from concrete, real-world conditions to the conceptual implications of those realities. In all cases, she centers the perspective of ordinary citizens and political challengers with an eye toward how the demos impacts political action and shapes political possibilities.
Jack Jin Gary Lee is Assistant Professor of Sociology at The New School for Social Research and Eugene Lang College of Liberal Arts. His scholarship explores how race and law shape the social logics and processes of governance in modern empires and (post)colonial states.
Gary’s projects and publications range across historical sociology, colonialism and empire, law and society, global health regulation, race and ethnicity, gender and sexuality, and international migration. Together with Professor Lynette J. Chua, he co-edited Contagion, Technology and Law at the Limits (Hart Publishing). His recent article, “Racialized Legalities: The Rule of Law, Race, and the Protection of Women in Britain’s Crown Colonies 1886-1890,” in Law and Social Inquiry, was recognized with the 2024 Best Scholarly Article Award by the American Sociological Association’s Section on Global and Transnational Sociology.
Mev Luna is a research-based artist whose practice spans performance, installation, video, new media, and text. Through an autoethnographic methodology, their work reappraises history to identify fictions governing contemporary life and considers issues of institutional access, incarceration, and how images of marginalized groups are circulated and controlled. Luna’s time-based works have premiered at SFMOMA (San Francisco, CA), Artists' Television Access (San Francisco, CA), The Gene Siskel Film Center (Chicago, IL), and Kino Moviemento (Berlin, Germany). They've given talks at the Bauhaus-Universität Weimar, Northwestern University, Vanderbilt University, Bard College, and The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Luna was a 2020-2021 Queer | Art NYC Film Fellow; 2018 Art Matters Foundation Fellowship recipient; 2018-2019 BOLT resident at the Chicago Artist Coalition; 2017 SOMA Summer participant in Mexico City; and a 2015–2016 Research Fellow at the Shapiro Center for Research and Collaboration. Luna was a 2020-2021 Queer | Art NYC Film Fellow and a 2018 Art Matters Foundation Fellowship recipient. Luna is currently an Assistant Professor of Contemporary Art Practice and Theory at Parsons School of Design and was a Visiting Critic in the Yale MFA Painting Department (Fall 2024).
