The Center for Emerging Worlds strives to go deeper than the headlines on national and international issues and to understand how the local is always connected to the global, and vice versa. Bringing together scholars, students, activists, visual artists, musicians, and religious leaders, the Center encourages collaborative inquiry into historical and contemporary worlds that have been created through cultural, social, environmental, and political encounters. The Center emphasizes how these emergent worlds create new forms of inequality while also offering new possibilities for resolving them. In the past three years, our themes have been Global Islam, Global China, and New Entanglements in the Global South.
Given the current world in which we live and the urgency of this historical moment, with an upsurge in right-wing movements across the globe, we would like to fund for next year a project on New Political Futures. We would like to bring together various generations of political activists—from the pan-Arab, pan-African, and nonaligned movements of the 1950s and 1960s, to the Civil Rights and Feminist movements of the 1960s, to the Anti-Nuclear movements of the 1970s, to the ACT UP movement in the 1980s and 1990s, to international social justice movements, the World Social Forum, Indigenous Rights, Black Lives Matter, and Immigrants Rights movements in the present—alongside scholars and artists to think through new forms of political action for a more just future. How, we will ask, might political lessons gleaned across different generations and different struggles—which include failures and unrealized political projects, as well as successes—enable us to re-imagine a politics for the future? Through public talks, brainstorming seminars, practical activism workshops, memory walk-and-talks, and podcasts, students at UC Santa Cruz will have the opportunity to learn more about histories of global and national activism in order to come up with creative and effective ways of doing politics themselves, at a time when alliance building and cross-cultural knowledge and understanding are more important than ever.
