Interdisciplinary Studies Institute 2025-2026 Call For Application

In 2024-2025, we looked at Entangled Environments and their interconnected Eco/ Socio/ Techno- Logics. In the 2025-2026 cycle, we turn our attention to the city and examine it through the lens of indeterminacy.  The shifting landscape of environmental, social, and political emergencies and complex geo-political formations and disintegrations have made indeterminacy is a constant feature of urban environments. While indeterminacy connotes uncertainty, it can also foster new forms of thinking and making by letting in interpretation, improvision, and ambiguity. With an interest in establishing new modes of co-thinking and co-working, indeterminacy is both understood as a condition that is forced upon us and one that can be embraced. We thus ask: What is a city? An idea, a history, a tangle of stories, a designated territory, a constellation of people, a network of structures and systems, or indefinite data? Whether we define the city in any of these manners, or in combinatory modes, whether we understand it in highly local terms or generally global ones, the trait of indeterminacy runs through constantly. In its inception, the city, was as much the domain of the philosopher as the realm of the poet, the arena of the politician, as the site for the architect. The emergence of inter and cross-disciplinary modes of thinking have shifted the interests and abilities of scientists, humanists, and artists to work across discrete fields and join their expertise to study complex phenomena. Large urban interventions and metro- and mega-politan projects are evermore conceived on ideas, processes, and systems of thinking that are no longer fixed nor disciplinary. The city is calling all, from humanists to engineers, from artists to social scientists, from planners to philosophers, from environmentalists to data scientists, to project and problem-solve together. 

What if we understand the city as a cantiere, a lively construction site with indeterminacy at its core? A construction site is often busy, bustling with energy and possibilities. There are indications and instructions, maps, and ordinances of how things go. There are forces and counter forces, elements one has planned for and those that one has not foreseen.  There are also tacit forms of knowledge and expertise at work, crises emerging and getting resolved. Embracing the evolving nature of the city will guide our thoughts as we propose to follow the four following threads: 

The contemporary city dwells in time: memories, histories, projections

The contemporary city transects nature: systems, structures, interconnections

The contemporary city presents rights: tensions, conflicts, forces

The contemporary city strives for health: food systems, care networks, infrastructures 

This call invites individuals whose work concerns natural, built, or artificial environments, to consider how their scholarship and creative work is entangled with other spheres, processes and disciplinary methods. While the focus of the seminar is on contemporary cities, we hope to integrate scholars and artists whose work focuses on historic and theoretical notions of the city. With this call we invite Faculty and students from across the University to participate in a year-long fellowship program. The seminars will be structured and run by the Director and in collaboration with the Fellows. In addition to final presentations, which will be open to all, we will reflect the work conducted through a web platform, and the Faculty Fellows are required to contribute work (creative work, scholarship, or participatory) into a collective compilation. Participation in the all the Seminar Sessions are required.