Global Working Groups

The institute’s core program, in development, will award fellowships to researchers in locations worldwide to develop and chair highly interdisciplinary working groups in close collaboration with local institutions (academic, cultural, and other). The working groups will run 3-5 years each.

They will be free to organize themselves as they wish, with in-person and remote activities, public events, online platforms, artistic interventions, publications, and articulations of their work through a variety of other media experiments. Crucial to the working groups is a yearly residency, where the chairs will gather for six weeks around a theme common to their groups. At the end of the third year, the institute will host a convening that will allow all the participants to gather around the questions that we hold in common if differently.

This program aims to assemble a constellation of individuals, venues, and institutions allied with the Wallerstein Institute and with each other, multiplying sites of open, integrated, collaborative, and imaginative research initiatives worldwide. One of Wallerstein’s central commitments was to “unthinking” and opening the social sciences, rescuing the social sciences (broadly construed) from their atomization into separate disciplines in the 19th and 20th centuries and from their artificially imposed distance from the natural sciences. The working groups will be spaces of encounter that operate “against the grain”, opening towards untimely and unanticipated futures. 

Organized around key themes that structure presents, these groups will assemble students, faculty, researchers, artists, and other thinkers and activators in any number of communities. Combining the work of the social and human sciences, the natural sciences, aesthetic practice, and democratic commitments, these groups open the possibility of inventing concepts adequate to world futures.