Uploaded August 2026 | Updated September 2026, 1 day ago
Critical thinking is increasingly under threat in a global capitalistic system that thrives on a fragmented understanding of its total impact on our lives. At the heart of philosopher Fredric Jameson's research was the drive to understand the totality of our social world. It is a project that has only become more vital as the current landscape of the social, world economics, and technology have become ever more fraught and complex.
This panel addresses the problem from multiple angles, drawing on Jameson's insights on cognitive mapping, interpretation and totality. The four panelists explore how language, media, technology, and aesthetic form both structure and resist our ability to think of the social whole. They extend Jameson's work to wrestle with the technological conditions of our present moment and to think beyond it.
Discussants include:
• Ryan Healey of the University of Basel
• D.W. Kamish from Simon Fraser University
• Chris Washington of Francis Marion University
• Hana Qugana from the University of Sussex
Chairs: Mathilde Hjertholm Nielsen & Alba Mas Sala of Duke University
ON THE CONFERENCE: Fredric Jameson (1934–2024) insisted on “imagining a future which might be radically and constitutionally other.” The urgency of this task rested on his understanding of Critical Theory “as a way of keeping the negative alive in a period in which praxis, the unity of the negative and the positive, itself seems suspended.” Over the years, Critical Theory has received scholarly and popular attention; it has simultaneously been pronounced dead and an enduring threat. We invited scholars, including students, to join us at Duke University for a three-day celebration of Fredric Jameson’s enduring legacy—and to keep imagining, with him, the future of Critical Theory.
Critical thinking is increasingly under threat in a global capitalistic system that thrives on a fragmented understanding of its total impact on our lives. At the heart of philosopher Fredric Jameson's research was the drive to understand the totality of our social world. It is a project that has only become more vital as the current landscape of the social, world economics, and technology have become ever more fraught and complex.
This panel addresses the problem from multiple angles, drawing on Jameson's insights on cognitive mapping, interpretation and totality. The four panelists explore how language, media, technology, and aesthetic form both structure and resist our ability to think of the social whole. They extend Jameson's work to wrestle with the technological conditions of our present moment and to think beyond it.
Discussants include:
• Ryan Healey of the University of Basel
• D.W. Kamish from Simon Fraser University
• Chris Washington of Francis Marion University
• Hana Qugana from the University of Sussex
Chairs: Mathilde Hjertholm Nielsen & Alba Mas Sala of Duke University
ON THE CONFERENCE: Fredric Jameson (1934–2024) insisted on “imagining a future which might be radically and constitutionally other.” The urgency of this task rested on his understanding of Critical Theory “as a way of keeping the negative alive in a period in which praxis, the unity of the negative and the positive, itself seems suspended.” Over the years, Critical Theory has received scholarly and popular attention; it has simultaneously been pronounced dead and an enduring threat. We invited scholars, including students, to join us at Duke University for a three-day celebration of Fredric Jameson’s enduring legacy—and to keep imagining, with him, the future of Critical Theory.
