2026 Theme: Renaissance

Our invitation to engage with renaissance does not entail a wish for a return to some nostalgically glorified time, as some renaissances have sought. Rather, it is based on a conviction in the continuous potential for rebirths that all presents hold, and on the equally-held belief that such rebirths require not an eschewing of the past or its replication, but a serious, critical, and future-minded engagement with its mixed legacies. This year, CSSD invites applications from working groups aiming towards social rebirth by thinking anew narratives about the past. Taking another cue from Kelley, the Center, in particular, seeks groups that think about not just “what they are fighting against” but consider “what are they fighting for” (8). In short, CSSD aims to reflect, through its chosen working groups, on questions such as: Which aspects of inherited pasts require caretaking and reinvigoration, and which require abandonment in order to develop ways to move forward - to be reborn? What methods of  remembrance and reckoning with the past’s legacies move us beyond coercive nostalgia or sanitized and obscuring histories?  

Such sought-after reassessments of the past will inherently entail unlearning. The Center thus encourages proposals that in their revisitations seek to upend inherited traditions and common sense values like freedom, democracy, and liberalism to name a few. From Paulo Freire’s emphasis on achieving ‘critical consciousness’ to bell hooks’ exhortation for ‘teaching to transgress’ and Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s call to ‘decolonize the mind,’ scholars have foregrounded the significance of intellectual emancipation work for building liberatory futures; these realizations have been taken up and put into practice both inside and outside the academy and all across the globe. While inspired in 2026 by events in its immediate US context, CSSD warmly welcomes applications that grapple with the historical legacies, intellectual traditions, and plethora of social justice movements and renaissances that developed between and far beyond US shores - from the Arab Renaissance of the late 19th to the early 20th centuries to the African Renaissance espoused by Cheikh Anta Diop in the mid-20th. 

As ongoing crises, which CSSD took up in its theme in 2025-2026, make the present increasingly unlivable, the question of renaissance becomes ever more critical. To quote a song from yet another Stevie Wonder album, With a Song in My Heart, we are asking working groups to: “Dream when you're feeling blue. Oh, dream, that's the thing to do.”