The Institute for Critical Social Inquiry will open part of its programming to the public – a series of lectures taught by this Summer's faculty cohort of Lewis Gordon (University of Connecticut) , Rashid Khalidi (Columbia University), Bernard Harcourt (Columbia University) and Homi Bhabha (Harvard University)

Lewis Gordon's lecture is entitled "Fanon at 100: A Lecture on Black Existentialism, Decolonizing Knowledge, Liberation, and Freedom".

This lecture will focus on themes of existentialism, especially Black Existentialism, and the role they play in the ongoing task of liberating humanity from epistemic bigotry and the difficult task of building practices of freedom. This will be done in no small part through commemorating, with great care to his thought and praxis, Frantz Fanon, the revolutionary psychiatrist and philosopher from Martinique, as 2025 marks the 100th anniversary of his birth.

Lewis R. Gordon, FRSA, is Board of Trustees Distinguished Professor of Philosophy and Global Affairs at the University of Connecticut and Distinguished Scholar at The Most Honourable PJ Patterson Centre for Africa-Caribbean Advocacy at The University of the West Indies, Mona. His recent books include Freedom, Justice, and Decolonization (Routledge, 2021); Fear of Black Consciousness (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux and Penguin Books, 2022); and Black Existentialism and Decolonizing Knowledge: Writings of Lewis R. Gordon (Bloomsbury, 2023). The 30th Anniversary Edition of his first book, Bad Faith and Antiblack Racism, will be published by Humanities Classics/R&L Publishers in 2025.

Register for other ICSI lectures here:

June 10, 5 PM: Rashid Khalidi

June 11, 5 PM: Bernard Harcourt

June 13, 5 PM: Homi Bhabha

About the Institute:
The Institute for Critical Social Inquiry (ICSI) is designed to provide advanced graduate students and junior faculty from around the world with the opportunity to spend one week at the New School’s campus in Greenwich Village working closely with some of the most distinguished thinkers shaping the course of contemporary social inquiry. Each of these scholars will teach a week-long seminar on a foundational thinker or topic of contemporary concern in a series of hands-on, intensive, and intimate sessions.