About
Denise Ferreira da Silva and Arjuna Neuman, 4 Waters: Deep Implicancy (still), 2018. Film. Photo: Courtesy of the artists.
The CRACS Co-Lab is a collective feminist intellectual hub for faculty and graduate students whose research focuses on global colonial and racial power and anti-colonial, anti-racist, and anti-caste transformation. The Co-Lab hosts conversations, experimentations, explorations oriented towards a global approach to questions of colonial and racial subjugation. Moving beyond the confines of Areas Studies and U.S. Ethnic Studies paradigms, our Co-Lab supports critical interventions that attend to the inseparability between racial-ethnic and caste subjugation nationally, regionally and globally across historic and contemporary geopolitical configurations of colonial subjugation.
Through this global prism, our Co-Lab offers a space to develop interdisciplinary research between U.S. based academics and scholars and interlocutors in the Global South–whether academics, artists and media-makers, or activists and policy-makers, whose work focuses on critical racial and anti-colonial analyses and interventions. We are interested in interrogating the trajectory of capitalism in the 21st century, and related political, economic, environmental, and humanitarian crises. These signal the need for developing critical tools and strategies that bring the analysis of colonial, racial, and cisheteropatriarchal subjugation to the center of the critique of global capital.
Our Co-Lab will host a series of interdisciplinary reading and study groups, workshops and residencies, that address three specific themes that have become key to critical thinking about capitalism in the last 15 years or more: debt, reparations and rebelry.
The CRACS Co-lab is supported by the Departments of Spanish & Portuguese and Media, Culture & Communication at New York University, the NYU Center for Faculty Advancement (CFA), the NYU Institute of Human Development and Social Change (IHDSC), and the Mellon Grant.
Denise Ferreira da Silva
Co-Director
Denise Ferreira da Silva is the Samuel Rudin Professor in the Humanities in the Department of Spanish & Portuguese at New York University. An academic and an artist, Dr. Denise Ferreira da Silva writes on crucial global issues, which she approaches from an anticolonial black feminist perspective. A prolific author, her field-changing books – such as Toward a Global Idea of Race and Unpayable Debt — have been published by major presses. Her several articles have been published in leading interdisciplinary journals, such as Social Text, Theory, Culture & Society, Social Identities, PhiloSOPHIA, Griffith Law Review, Theory & Event, The Black Scholar, to name a few. Her artistic works includes the films Serpent Rain (2016) and 4Waters-Deep Implicancy (2018), Soot Breath/Corpus Infinitum (2020) in collaboration with Arjuna Neuman; and the relational art practices Poethical Readings and Sensing Salon, in collaboration with Valentina Desideri. She has exhibited and lectured at major art venues, such as the Pompidou Center (Paris), Whitechapel Gallery (London, MASP (Sāo Paulo), Reina Sofia (Madrid), The Belkin (Vancouver), Guggenheim (New York), MACBA (Barcelona), and MoMa (New York) as well as 10th Berlin Biennial, Document14, 2022 Singapore Biennial. She has held Visiting Professorships at major universities, such as University of Pennsylvania, New York University, University of Toronto, Universidade de São Paulo, University of Copenhagen. She held the 2023 International Chair in Contemporary Philosophy at the Department of Philosophy at the University of Paris 8.
She is a member of several boards, including the Third Text editorial collective, the Advisory Board for the International Consortium for Critical Theory Programs and the editorial boards for journals Postmodern Culture, Catalyst, Social Identities, and Dark Matter.
Paula Chakravartty
Co-Director
James Weldon Johnson Associate Professor of Media Studies at the Gallatin School and the Department of Media, Culture and Communication at New York University. Her research and teaching interests span comparative political economy, media infrastructures and social movements through the study of colonial and racial power. She has published widely in numerous leading journals across disciplines including American Quarterly, Antipode, Economic and Political Weekly, The Journal of Communication, Media Culture and Society, International Journal of Communication, Political Communication, among others. Her books include Race, Empire and the Crisis of the Subprime (Co-edited with Denise Ferreira da Silva with Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013), Media Policy and Globalization (Co-Authored by Katharine Sarikakis with Edinburgh University Press, 2006), and Global Communications: Towards a Transcultural Political Economy (Co-Edited with Yuezhi Zhao with Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2008). She is currently working on a monograph on Media and Economic Violence and a co-authored manuscript on Media, Race and and the Infrastructures of Empire (with Miriyam Aouragh for Sage Press). She is involved in several on-going collaborative projects. These include a field-based partnership research project, funded by the SSHRC (co-PI Professor Michelle Buckley), on migrant mobility and debt in Uttar Pradesh, India, with Chambal Media/Khabar Lahariya and the Building and Woodworkers International (BWI) Union. She is also a member of the “Media and the Constitution of the Political” Module within the International Center for Advanced Studies (ICAS), and is collaborating with Sareeta Amrute, Shivangi Narayan, Murali Shanmuvagelan on a new research project on Caste, Communication and Tech. She also serves as the Vice President of the NYU Chapter of the AAUP (American Association of University Professors).
Lee Xie
Postdoctoral Fellow
Lee Xie is a Provostial & CRACS Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Spanish & Portuguese at New York University. An interdisciplinary scholar, she researches and teaches on contemporary Asian diasporic cultural production in the Global South, with a focus on contemporary art, performance and aesthetics. Her dissertation, "Opaque Entanglements: Reparative Memories of Chinese Diasporas in Latin America & the Caribbean (2008-2024)," analyzed memory-making practices in a recent body of work by Asian diasporic feminist writers and artists, showing the links between Asian diasporic memory, identity formation, and racialization through form and affect. She has received research fellowships from the NYU Graduate School of Arts & Sciences and the NYU Center for the Humanities. With a public-facing and experimental research practice across fields and disciplines, she has been a grant awardee and collaborator on Public Humanities projects and interdisciplinary research labs including the ZIP Code Memory Project: Practices of Justice and Repair (housed at the Columbia Center for the Study of Social Difference and funded by the Henry Luce Foundation), the Cross/Currents H-Lab, funded by the NYU Center for the Humanities, and the Critical Racial Anti Colonial Study Co-Lab. She has published in academic and artistic venues such as CUNY FORUM and Contemporary And América Latina and presented her work internationally at conferences and institutional contexts including Tate Britain. She holds a Ph.D. in Spanish language & literatures from New York University.
Mary Ainomugisha
Research Assistant
Mary Ainomugisha (she/they/any) is a PhD student in the Department of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University. Their research focuses on media practices within and around communities on the margins of socio-economic and political life in the East African region, with a critical emphasis on the contours of race, gender, and global political economy. Their MA thesis (from MCC) makes inquires into the encounters of migrant domestic workers from Uganda and Kenya with their employers and transnational actors in the Gulf Council states of the Middle East, examining the interplay with media infrastructures. The fieldwork segment, consisting of oral history interviews with returned migrant domestic workers in Uganda and Kenya, received support from the NYU Migration Network, where she is a 2023-24 graduate student fellow. In February 2024, she co-authored a chapter titled "#WeAreRemovingADictator: The 2021 Uganda Election Crisis, the Possibilities, and Limits of Youth Digital Activism" in the Handbook of Youth Activism. Ainomugisha also serves as an editorial assistant for the Communication Culture & Critique (CCC) Journal.
Valentina Desideri
Postdoctoral Fellow
Valentina Desideri is a Provostial & CRACS Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Spanish & Portuguese at New York University and a Junior Researcher at the Centre for Arts and the Political Imaginary at the Royal Institute of Arts/HDK-Valand in Sweden. She is also an affiliated reseracher at the Centre for Theatre Studies at the University of Lisbon. She explores art making as a form of study and study as a form of making art. She is an artist, researcher and community organizer working internationally across the fields of contemporary art, performance studies, expanded choreography, community organizing and social justice. She trained in contemporary dance at the Laban Centre in London (2003–2006), later on did her MA in Fine Arts at the Sandberg Institute in Amsterdam (2011–13), and now holds a PhD in Race, Gender, Sexuality and Social Justice from the University of British Columbia, Vancouver (2023). She does Fake Therapy and Political Therapy, and is one of the co-organizes of Performing Arts Forum, an artist-run space in the north of France. She collaborates with Stefano Harney with whom she co-authored two texts, and with Denise Ferreira da Silva, with whom she developed the practice of Poethical Readings (2015), the project The Sensing Salon (2016), and lately Reading With Echo (2024), all still ongoing. She is a member of the online platform www.ehcho.org.