Situated at the present historical moment of resurgent white nationalism and xenophobia, Sanctuary Spaces: Reworlding Humanism, a Mellon Foundation Sawyer Seminar, undertakes comparative inquiry of imaginations and practices of sanctuary and refuge. Thinking across Europe and the United States, the seminar foregrounds the colonial relationalities and histories of dispossession that constitute the grounds of migration and asylum in the liberal democracies of the West. Seeking to accompany movements that challenge detention and deportation, Sanctuary Spaces supports scholarship, art, and pedagogy that enact different humanisms and other worlds of political being. Organized around three themes, Abolition on Stolen Land, The End of Humanitarianism, and Freedom and Fugitivity, the year-long endeavor convenes public programs, virtual residencies, and conceptual conversations to generate frames and actions that unravel the logics of liberalism and its entanglements with imperialism. Learn more about Sanctuary Spaces: Reworlding Humanism.

Virtual Residencies: James Crosby | Electronic Disturbance Theater/EDT 2.0 (micha cárdenas, Amy Sara Carroll, Ricardo Dominguez, Elle Mehrmand, Brett Stalbaum) | (F)EMPOWER’s Niki Franco & Helen Peña