The Society for the Humanities at Cornell University seeks interdisciplinary research projects for year-long residencies that reflect on the theme of Crossing.
Crossing begins by opening a possibility: to meet or to pass by, to encounter in a spirit of collaboration or conflict. Like an X on a map, crossing marks both a place and a process, an intersection and a journey. Crossing entails navigating borders between states on scales ranging from the cellular to the geopolitical. As the embodiment of movement, crossing creates opportunity and transition, continuity and contact, collision and negation, while its infrastructures implicate objects, channels, and traces in the passage of bodies and ideas.
In its capacious fluidity, crossing describes incursions and excursions of all kinds. It can testify to migration and exile, to shifting formations of gender and sexuality, to cultures of creolization and code-switching. At the same time, it can denote an act of cancelation or erasure: a literal crossing out. The act of crossing two pen strokes forms an X that stands as a symbol of identification or denial, affirmation or rejection. Conversely, “crossed wires” as an admission of confusion can lead to unexpected or dangerous outcomes, as can roads or tracks that cross, and the confrontations they enable.
As a cultural-political phenomenon, crossing can be a transgression that breaks down boundaries of style and genre in music, fiction, and digital media. In forming junctions, engendering hybridity, and inevitably leading to entanglement, crossing is transient and provisional, inviting us to think beyond the ostensible stability of the categories it connects and bypasses as well as on the spaces in-between.
The Society for the Humanities invites applications from scholars and artists who are interested in participating in a productive, critical dialogue concerning the topic of crossing from a variety of disciplinary perspectives.
More on Crossing
Image by Parham Ghalamdar via www.ghalamdar.com
