This talk was part of the "Humanities and Public Life" symposium, a part of the Research 150 Sesquicentennial Conference in Spring 2018.
ABSTRACT:
We live in times of increasingly severe and entangled political, ecological, and educational crises. Coles argues that responding to these challenges requires a “visionary pragmatism” that works at the generative intersections between imaginative, radically transformative intellectual life and fine-grained practices engaged in cultivating practical change. This, in turn, hinges on co-creating knowledge and practice in hybrid publics composed of interdisciplinary scholars and students from educational institutions, on the one hand, and people associated with myriad other communities, organizations, and movements, on the other. Offering a distinctive perspective, he suggests that only by shifting our institutions and knowledge production in more profoundly public and pragmatic directions can we move beyond the ruts of both increasingly stagnant ‘critique’ and diminishing political, ecological and educational horizons. His reflections are at once richly theoretical and grounded in decades of work in political activism, civic engagement, and movements for institutional change in higher education.