Critical Intent April 19

UPS Foundation Professor Wendy Brown offered introductory remarks at the start of the second day of "Critical Intent as a Form of Life." 

Speakers: Lucas Bessire, Veena Das, Carolina Kobelinsky, Marcelo Moura Mello, David Owen, Alondra Nelson (moderator)

This panel considered research as an intervention. What ethical, epistemological, and political dimensions emerge when fieldwork occurs within institutions of power: prisons, courts, borders, hospitals? Panelists examined how research practice itself generates forms of knowledge that contest institutional opacity, produce counternarratives to official accounts, and establish new terms of accountability while advancing critical modes of social scientific analysis.

Speakers: Bruce Western, Reuben Jonathan Miller, Deva Woodly, Aslı Ü. Bâli, Robert Quinn, Joan Scott (moderator)

Critical scholarship produces risk for both research subjects and researchers. This panel confronted the ethical paradox of exposure: how can documentation that challenges institutional violence simultaneously endanger those it seeks to defend? Panelists examined the structural conditions constraining academic freedom—legal repression, institutional censorship, surveillance—and theorized strategies for sustaining scholarly inquiry under conditions of precarity and constraint.

Speakers: Rosalind Morris, Natasha Raheja, Jake Raynal, Derek Bermel, Maria Loh (Moderator)

What epistemological possibilities emerge when aesthetic practice travels with social inquiry? This panel examined how film, photography, graphic narrative, and poetry generate distinctive modes of intellectual insight and meaning irreducible to conventional scholarly frameworks. Derek Bermel, Rosalind Morris, Natasha Raheja, Jake Raynal, Maria Loh, and Edmond Rodriguez explored the relationship between ethnographic and artistic methods, exploring how affective and sensory dimensions of witnessing produce knowledge that challenges, complements, or exceeds conventional social science analysis. 

Speakers: Razia Iqbal, João Biehl, Didier Fassin

Didier Fassin discussed his upbringing, his intellectual trajectory, and his research with journalist Razia Iqbal and Princeton University anthropologist João Biehl.

PHOTOS FROM APRIL 19