The Future Moment: A Panel Discussion and Open Forum

We are at the year mark of finding ourselves under unprecedented conditions, from a sustained assault on the university as an institution to the concerted assault on political, human, and social rights. Even though unprecedented in this country, the current moment is recognizable as having existed before in commensurable iterations elsewhere. Last Spring Semester we discussed how we would trace the commensurable and the incommensurable in these other moments so that we can properly and accurately name this one. We attempted to see both its bones and its muscles, identify its nervous system, consider its synapses and identify its mechanics, think of its levers and its bolts, its ignition and its transmission, while keeping within our frame questions of justice and democracy. We engaged in short interventions primarily concerned with definitions of this new iteration of governmentality in the country: is it authoritarianism? Fascism? Totalitarianism? Dictatorship? Junta? Techno-feudalism? Just plain avarice? Or something else, yet unnamed because of its novelty? We considered problems of academic practice (academic asylum, academic freedom, the right to pose questions); the imperative of the law; modes of activist thinking, the proleptic importance of definitions.

A year into this new landscape, and in the wake of the mayoral election in the city that has the potential to change the map, we will embark in a discussion about the futurity of the current moment, looking back at the questions of last Spring, tracing the currents and the subcurrents of our current lived experience, of our exposure to formations of violence that are both recognizable and otherworldly, as they spell out a future where no one and nothing is safe, earned or sacred. Pr*son and exile, human and civil rights, independent research and scholarship, are now in a present that has eroded any remnants of the social welfare state and is sculpted by personal whim and profit. We will engage in short, emergent positions, no longer than 5 minutes each, hold a discussion among the panelists for twenty minutes, and open the space for discussion with the audience.

About the Panelists

is Dean of Humanities and Jesse and George Siegel Professor in the Humanities in the Department of Latin American and Iberian Cultures, with a joint appointment in the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society. Prior to returning to Columbia in 2016, he taught for many years at Harvard and Cornell University. His research covers a wide range of topics in literature, culture, and politics in modern Latin America as well as contemporary philosophy and political theory.

is a contemporary critical theorist, advocate, and the author most recently of Cooperation: A Political, Economic, and Social Theory (Columbia UP, 2023). The Isidor and Seville Sulzbacher Professor of Law and Professor of Political Science at Columbia University, Harcourt is also the Founding Director of the Columbia Center for Contemporary Critical Thought and a directeur d’études (chaired professor) at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris. His book, Critique & Praxis (Columbia, 2020), won the 46th annual Lionel Trilling Prize.

(Ph.D. King’s College London) is Senior Lecturer in Modern Greek and Director of Undergraduate Studies in Classics, Ancient Studies, and Hellenic Studies at Columbia University. His work bridges queer theory, reception studies, and Modern Greek and Cypriot literature, often tracing how literature and culture shape—and are shaped by—questions of identity, belonging, grief, and the body. He has held research fellowships at the University of Amsterdam and the University of Cambridge. His book in progress, A Queer History of Modern Greek Writing (1821–2021), follows two centuries of Greek literature to uncover how queer voices have navigated visibility, censorship, and reinvention, situating these narratives within shifting ideas of nationhood, cultural memory, and the intertwined queer histories of the Eastern Mediterranean. Comparative in scope, the project also examines how ancient texts have been appropriated by queer writers in Greece to both recreate and ultimately depart from this classical tradition.

Wilfredo Laracuente is a Work Readiness Instructor with Opportunities for a Better Tomorrow and a dedicated advocate for reentry and workforce development. He earned his Bachelor’s degree in Behavioral Science from Mercy College in 2019 while incarcerated and has since facilitated reentry workshops, mentored youth, and served as a Teaching Assistant for Columbia University’s Pr*son Education Program. Currently, he is a Beyond the Bars Fellow at Columbia University, focusing on trauma among incarcerated women—the fastest-growing Pr*son population. Wilfredo brings both lived experience and professional expertise to his work, emphasizing transformation, equity, and opportunity.

is a Professor in the Department of Latin American and Iberian Cultures, Columbia University. She specializes in modern and contemporary Latin American Cultures. She is co-editor of Routledge Companion to Nineteenth-Century Latin America (2024) and The Argentina Reader: History, Culture and Politics (2002 and 2026). She is the author of more than ten books, including her latest. Museum of Consumption. Archives of Mass Culture in Argentina (2021). She was Chair and Director of Graduate Studies of the Latin American and Iberian Cultures department.

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