Fall 2022

Aesthetics & Politics Lecture Series Fall 2022 Poster

The School of Critical Studies is pleased to announce the Spring 2022 Aesthetics and Politics Lecture Series. The theme for this semester is "Into the Radical Imaginary: Contemporary Perspectives on Art and Struggle." 

Over the last decade, wave after wave of struggle has cracked open the radical social imaginary, aiming for the roots of systems of domination and creating space for liberatory formations to emerge. If another world once more seems possible, what new – and renewed - understandings of aesthetics and politics can help us bring it into being?

Live and Online

All events are free and open to the public. Visit the CalArts Calendar for full event listings.

Co-sponsored by the Armory Center for the Arts and the CalArts MA in Aesthetics and Politics Program, with support from the CalArts IDEA Cooperative. Convened by Janet Sarbanes. 


Ana Vujanović & Bojana Cvejić’: Transindividual Futures

Ana Vujanović is a cultural worker based in Berlin and Belgrade. As an independent researcher, writer, and dramaturge she works in the fields of performance, culture, gender studies and film. She is engaged in cultural activism in Belgrade and internationally. 

Bojana Cvejić’ research spans performance theory, philosophy, and dance studies. As a dramaturg, she has collaborated with choreographers and collectives on performances and independent self-organized platforms for artistic production, theory and education in Europe and former Yugoslavia.

Together they are co-authors of the book Public Sphere by Performance (B_Books 2012) and Toward a Transindividual Self (Sarma, 2022).

Event Details

Shana L. Redmond: Agencies of Menace - The State, the Car, and the Music in Between

Shana L. Redmond is the author of Anthem: Social Movements and the Sound of Solidarity in the African Diaspora (2014) and Everything Man: The Form and Function of Paul Robeson (2020), which received a 2021 American Book Award. She is Professor of English and Comparative Literature and the Center for the Study of Ethnicity & Race at Columbia University and President of the American Studies Association (2022-2023).

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Jennifer Ponce de León and Gabriel Rockhill: The Power of Aesthetics and the Aesthetics of Power

Jennifer Ponce de León is an interdisciplinary scholar who researches 20th and 21st century Left movements and cultural production in the Americas and Marxist, anticolonial and postcolonial thought.

Gabriel Rockhill is a philosopher, cultural critic and activist who publishes in English and French. His work is dedicated to a materialist analysis of the social totality, and it has thus far focused primarily on the three intertwining themes of history, politics and culture.

Event Details


For more information on the Aesthetics and Politics Lecture Series or for accessibility questions, please contact the Visiting Artist Coordinator at csartistcoordinator@calarts.edu