Social Justice, Innocence and Discomfort
15 May - 12 June 2025
Biography
Miriam Ticktin is Professor of Anthropology at the CUNY (City University of New York) Graduate Center, and Director of the Center for Place, Culture and Politics. She has held positions at the New School for Social Research, University of Michigan, and at Columbia University, and she has been a fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, the Russell Sage Foundation in New York City, and an invited visiting professor at the EHESS and University of Paris 8 in Paris. She received her PhD in Anthropology at Stanford University and the École des hautes études en sciences sociales in Paris, France, and an MA in English Literature from Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar.
She publishes widely on topics such as migration, borders, humanitarianism, and racial and gendered inequalities, and most recently, she has written about the idea of a decolonial feminist commons. She is the author of the award-winning Casualties of Care: Immigration and the Politics of Humanitarianism in France (University of California Press, 2012), and co-editor of In the Name of Humanity: The Government of Threat and Care (Duke University Press, 2010).
Her latest book, Against Innocence: Undoing and Remaking the World, is forthcoming with University of Chicago Press in 2025. It explores the political work done by the concept of innocence, tracking how, in the Euro-American liberal -- and increasingly illiberal -- context, discourses and images of innocence get assembled and weaponized across the fields of immigration, gender politics, racial politics and environmentalism, and used to decide why and how we should care, for whom, and whose lives matter. She argues that claims to innocence end up perpetuating inequality, violence and exclusion; instead she elaborates on a non-innocent, abolitionist future, where inter-relationality is key, and where a world without borders and private property is already being experimented with. She is currently working on her next book, Containment and Commoning: From Bordered Worlds to Collective Life, tracing two opposing political processes: containment (border walls and technologies, quarantining) and commoning (translocal processes of mutuality, respect and sharing, that dispense with private property, and work towards no borders worlds). Ticktin writes in public venues such as Truthout, LARB and Open Democracy, and organizes with migrant social justice groups in the US and in France.
Research Summary
This visit will build relations between UoB, the CUNY Graduate Center and the world-renowned Center for Place, Culture and Politics (CPCP), of which Ticktin has been appointed director. As incoming director, Ticktin is working to build a set of global connections on social justice related research themes. Topics such as the externalization of borders, or the abolition of borders and prisons (carceral regimes), are important and timely topics that interest both UoB and CUNY. To achieve these aims Ticktin's visit will include:
1) a public lecture entitled "From Transnational Borders to No Borders? Commoning, Abolition and Imagining Otherwise", a graduate seminar and facilitating engagement with colleagues across the School of Arts;
2) developing a piece of work on discomfort and social justice;
3) developing a plan for future collaborations between UoB and CPCP.
The details of Professor Ticktin's lectures and seminars will be listed on our Events page in due course.
You can contact Professor Ticktin's host Dr Juan Zhang for further information.
