The twelve-part Correction* Seminar Series is structured as an open curriculum and presented from September 2022 through May 2024. Led by Vera List Center faculty and staff, each monthly seminar in this two-year series explores the perils and potentials of the political, social, and metaphorical implications of “correction.” Bridging theory and practice, Correction* unfolds through three distinct research clusters every semester set to guide our joint investigation into Restitution, the Body, and Carcerality. It is presented as part of the Barbara Jordan Lectures: The State of Democracy series.

Seminar 1: Ashes to Artifact: Cultural Death, Repair, and Restitution of the Benin Bronzes
September 26, 2022
6:00–7:30pm EDT
Online

For this seminar, Cresa Pugh, Assistant Professor of Sociology at The New School, explores the return of the Benin Bronzes and what it means to attempt to overcome more than a century of imperial violence against this collection of artifacts and their descendants. Pugh’s lecture is punctuated by poetry readings by Nigerian poet Inua Ellams.

Seminar 2: Virus Becoming
November 7, 2022
6–7:30 pm EST
Online

In the second VLC Correction* seminar, Virus Becoming, artist and film-maker Shu Lea Cheang examines bioinformatics (the collection and interpretation of biological data) and bioengineering glitches, speculating on the self-emancipatory potential of the virus as a non-binary, transgenic entity at the intersection of science fiction, gender studies, and queer culture.

Seminar 3: Correcting Mistaken Ideas: Revisiting the People’s Program at Lincoln Hospital
February 13, 2023
6–7:30 pm EST
Online

Acupuncturist, community organizer, and former Young Lord Walter Bosque shares the history of radical acupuncture at the People’s Program, a drug treatment organization founded in 1970 at Lincoln Hospital in the South Bronx by the Young Lords along with members of the Black Panther Party and the Health Revolutionary Unity Movement. Bosque’s presentation will be accompanied by a response and conversation with Monxo López, curator, cartographer, South Bronx-based environmental activist, and co-founder of South Bronx Unite.

Seminar 4: Becoming One: The University Between Labor Struggles and Communities of Care
February 27, 2023
6:30–8 pm EST
Wollman Hall, The New School
Livestreamed

With the conclusion of the part-time faculty strike at The New School and the ongoing organizing by students, faculty, and staff, this seminar makes space to process and understand the strike and its aftermath. Speakers include One New School and students from Parsons Fine Arts as well as Ujju Aggarwal, Assistant Professor of Anthropology and Experimental Learning; Zoe Carey, President, ACT-UAW Local 7902; Tamara Oyola Santiago, Director of Wellness and Health Promotion; and Joshua Scannell, Assistant Professor of Media Studies, The New School.

Seminar 5: Lupus as an Operating System
Monday, April 10, 2023
6–7:30 pm EDT
Online

Poet Cyrée Jarelle Johnson explores the way anti-Blackness, trauma, and environmental degradation converge to create bodies that internalize overcorrection, resulting in disablement, debility, and disability. Viewing systemic disabilities through the lens of cyborg studies, Johnson uses their background in library and information science to consider the role overcorrection and planned obsolescence play in contemporary American culture.

Seminar 6: Indigenous Cultural Revitalization: Rematriation and Preservation
Monday, May 1, 2023
6–7:30 pm EDT 
Online

Convened by Larissa Nez (Diné), Borderlands Curatorial Fellow, Seminar 6 considers rematriation and the preservation of Indigenous culture, art, and land. Speakers are Jeremy Dennis, a photographer, founder and president of Ma’s House, and member of the Shinnecock Indian Nation in Southampton, NY; Indigenous rights activist contemporary mixed media artist Leonard Harmon, a citizen of the Lenape Tribe of New Jersey and the Nanticoke Tribe of Delaware; and Sutton King, MPH, Nāēqtaw-Pianakiw (“comes first woman”), an Afro-Indigenous descendent of the Menominee and Oneida Nations of Wisconsin and Co-Founder of Urban Indigenous Collective.

Seminar 7: Bring into Order: School(ing) as a War of Correction
Monday, September 18, 2023
6–7:30 pm EDT
Online

Year two of the Correction* Seminar Series begins with a look at education and prison systems. This conversation between scholar Dylan Rodríguez and  poet, teacher, and advocate Alejo Rodriguez not only pushes beyond “reform” as an objective of collective engagement with, and revolt against, regimes of correction (schooling and otherwise) but also recognizes how reform is already part of the correctional apparatus and its logic of carcerality and policing.

Seminar 8: “Hader Halal” (With Regard to Presence)
Monday, November 13, 2023, 12–1:30 pm EST
Online

Co-presented with OSUN Center for Human Rights & The Arts at Bard, Fehras Publishing Practices’s Sami Rustom and Kenan Darwich share their research into the history and presence of publishing and its entanglement in the sociopolitical and cultural sphere in the Eastern Mediterranean, North Africa, and the Arab diaspora.

Seminar 9: Of Bodies and Sound
Monday, December 18, 2023, 12–1:30 pm EST
Online

Amsterdam-based Kosovar artist Astrit Ismaili’s performance lecture centers on how bodies are constructed, modified, and interpreted through contemporary society, but also how they are heard, asking what it means to sonify a body politic.

Seminar 10: Reducing Harm (As Prompt, As Practice)
Monday, February 12, 2024, 3 pm EST
Online

Launching the final semester of the Correction* Seminar Series, this conversation unpacks harm reduction as an expansive and diverse set of practices and principles that challenge structures of power and how they can prompt collective liberation through the care for our own and each other’s bodies. The conversation features Imani Mason Jordan, interdisciplinary writer, artist, editor and curator, and is moderated by co-convener Tamara Oyola-Santiago, Director of Wellness and Health Promotion at Student Health Services at The New School.

Seminar 11: Many Returns
Monday, March 4, 2024, 6–7:30 pm EST
Online

Palestinian artist Vivien Sansour shares the Palestinian Heirloom Seed Library project, which seeks to preserve and restore heritage and threatened seed varieties. Indigenous Yaqui and Jewish multidisciplinary artist Tehila speaks to her artistic practice as a Water Protector and Land Guardian. Krystal Two Bulls (Oglala Lakota and Northern Cheyenne), Honor the Earth Executive Director, speaks to her organizing and activist work protecting environmental rights and lands of Indigenous people through Land Back and educational initiatives. This seminar is co-sponsored by The Tishman Environment and Design Center and the Environmental Policy and Sustainability Management program at The New School.

Seminar 12: Strike That
Monday, May 13, 2024, 6–7:30 pm EDT
Online

Writing and speaking in public entail constant editing, revision, redaction, and correction. Oftentimes these are dictated by style guides, genre conventions, or shifting cultural and political discourse—what some might call “political correctness”—but more often than not, by the writer’s or speaker’s practice of pushing the boundaries of language and craft and propriety and legitimacy.

From correction on the page to correction of one’s body to the course correction of the body politic or financial markets—correction holds the potential to learn, reshape, and turn things around. Correction, the act of identifying and rectifying an error or inaccuracy, is ostensibly intended to make things better or right. Yet the potential of the correction and its capacity to offer transformation and repair have their corollary in discipline and censure.

The 2022–2024 VLC Focus Theme: Correction* and the programs dedicated to it explore the tension and discomfort it inspires to pose questions about the metaphorical, political, and social dimensions and implications of correction. How is correctness enacted and performed across histories and institutions? Who is asked to correct and who resists and refuses correction or accountability? How is correction internalized, and is it ever enough? Can it get us closer to truth, to liberation? To our authentic (and improved) selves? How do we teach or learn through correction? What are we correcting towards and along which measure? When does reform give way to overhaul, to revolution?

The focus theme—which permeates all of the Center’s activities—is an opportunity to investigate the contradictions of correction, making space not only to consider existing histories, systems, and modes but also to challenge our position and relationship to the act of correcting. Accordingly, the asterisk holds space for future annotations. As the Vera List Center for Art and Politics enters its 30th year, the theme is also a call for adjustments, revisions, and course correction for the organization as it takes up the demands and challenges of our moment.