PEOPLE’S INSTITUTE FOR THE ADVANCEMENT OF SCIENCE AND ART
GLOBAL
BLACK STUDIES WORKROOM CONFERENCE
hosted by
THE PEOPLE’S INSTITUTE
The Cooper Union
New York, New York, USA
16th- 18th, April 2026
RE: RELEVANCE
hosted by
THE PEOPLE’S INSTITUTE
The Cooper Union
New York, New York, USA
16th- 18th, April 2026
RE: RELEVANCE
The first convening of the Global Black Studies Workroom (GBSW) occurred at Rutgers University in 2024. It invited institutes, scholars, and researchers from around the globe who centered their efforts around the idea of Global Blackness. They presented on local methodology and current work to initiate a network across institutes and centers of study. Our project was to circumvent, whilst acknowledging our being embedded in and relying upon, the norms and structures that attempt to regulate what kind of research and, therefore, what kind of statements and claims can be made about our contemporary state of affairs re: race, ethnicity, colonization, and power.
The GBSW takes up the question of RELEVANCE for our 2026 convening. Black study, as an analysis of position and modality, presents us with the border, as well as what’s outside and captured within current academic and scholarly frameworks. It reveals the infrastructures sanctioned by those working through them. Indeed, the question of Blackness has proven to be a standpoint that can ascertain and critique norms and structures quicker than those who regulate what claims, interventions, and proposals are allowed back into and valued within that system. It allows us to explore untold modes of inhabiting and engaging in/with the world. The second convening of this conference cannot come at a more pressing time.
Consequently, how can Black studies, facing global authoritarian drifts in these locally shrinking infrastructures, and despite these normalized and normative violences, remain globally and locally relevant, in the most expansive meaning of this word? How can Black studies still matter, make sense, find a public, talk to others, offer a future, teach the past, and give meaning to its relevance in/to the present situation? And conversely, how does Black studies allow us to interrogate the relevance of contemporary frameworks and infrastructures to address our current politico-socio-environmental predicament? How does Black Studies chart these relevances from the other, more apt, scholarly infrastructures and norms?
This second edition of the Global Black Studies Workroom Conference will be held in April 2026 at The Cooper Union from Thursday, the 16th, to Saturday, the 18th. The convening will be organized around three themes: GOVERNMENTALITY; CLIMATE AND REPARATIONS; and MOVEMENT(s). Within those three, there is ample space to take stock of the changing tide of global discourse, altering the roots and routes of scholarship and research that we must take.
GBSW Committee | contact: peoplesinstitute@cooper.edu
Baba Badji – Rutgers University
Hugo Bujon – Lehman College-CUNY
Amelia Herbert – Barnard College/Columbia University
Victor Peterson II – Cooper Union
SCHEDULE
APRIL 15th
Henry Street Settlement’s
Lillian Wald Symposium Panel
“How Can Big Change Happen in NYC?”
at
Abrons Arts Center
466 Grand Street
New York, New York
Time 6 - 8 PM
PANELISTS
Christopher Marte (NYC Council Member District 1)
Barika Williams (Director, Association of Neighborhood and Housing Development)
Mason Williams (Associate Professor of Leadership Studies and Political Science, Williams College)
Anne Williams-Isom (Former Deputy Mayor, Health and Human Services)
Nora Yayah (Chief Government Affairs Officer, The Metropolitan Museum of Art)
MODERATOR: Jessic Yager (Senior Director, Housing Justice Initiatives for Justice Innovation)
RSVP
APRIL 16th