LOOK!: a graduate workshop on aesthetics, politics, and media
Presented by the graduate fellows at the Institute for the Study of Sexuality and Gender at Columbia University.
April 17–18, 2026
Please RSVP for the workshop by Monday 13th. After that deadline, email the organizers directly at [email protected] to register.
Frantz Fanon’s seminal essay “The Lived Experience of the Black Man” begins with an imperative: “Look!” This command cascades through the essay, exploding Fanon’s prose as both a mode of violence and a demand for recognition. Pinned by the white child’s look, Fanon is transformed into an “object among other objects” and denied the reciprocal recognition that might otherwise establish him as a subject. In turn, he converts himself into an object of knowledge, inhabiting the very terms by which he was seen: “Since the Other was reluctant to recognize me, there was only one answer: to make myself known.” This tension between looking and knowing strikes at the heart of a Western philosophical tradition that has long conflated visibility with truth — and it is here that Fanon’s essay becomes a critical site through which we might better apprehend the sedimented aesthetic logics that underwrite our contemporary order.
Across two days, four panel discussions, a free guided tour of the Studio Museum, and a keynote address by Rachel Grace Newman, this workshop will interrogate the politics and ethics of looking, with particular attention to the aesthetic, historical, and racial grammars that shape visual perception.
Friday, April 17th
- 2:00–4:00pm. Guided Tour of the Studio Museum, Location: 144 W 125th St
- 4:30–6pm. Keynote address by Rachel Grace Newman, Assistant Professor of African American and African Diaspora Studies, Location: 754 Schermerhorn Ext.
Saturday, April 18th - Location 754 Schermerhorn Ext.
- 9:30am | Coffee and pastries
- 10–11:15am | In Living Color: On Blackness, Form, and Poetics with Jay Gao (Columbia), Sofia Smith (Brown), and Desiree McCary (Pittsburgh Theological Seminary)
- 11:30–12:45pm | Sensational Film: On Cinema, Perception, and Aesthetic Vulnerability with Madelyn Neal (NYU), Amira Olinguo (Brown), and Amy Poncher (University of Southern California)
- 1–2:15pm | Lunch, which will be provided for registered attendees
- 2:30–3:45pm | The "Right to Look": Ethnography, Surveillance, and Policing with Frances Cathryn (Columbia), Hayoung Lee (Columbia), and Pat Torres (Columbia)
- 4–5:15pm | On the Move: Comparative & Transnational Approaches with Daria Sadova (NYU), Lauren Stockmon Brown (Columbia), Isabella Pereira Nikel (Columbia)
Co-sponsored by the Department of African American and African Diaspora Studies, the Institute for Research in African American Studies, the Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race, the Trans and Queer Theory Colloquium, and the African American Studies Colloquium.
