The Unsettlement Project - Incite at Columbia University

We live in a time of world-historical and planetary transformation. Anthropogenic climate change and so-called artificial intelligence, accelerating and reinforcing each other, are shifting the terrain on which we reside—materially, socially, and psychically. Intensifying competition over energy, water, and minerals, shaped by shifting regional alliances, are spurring neo-imperial wars and local conflicts over resources, violently unmooring people from place. 

AI, in turn, unmoors not only whole labor sectors, but an entire system of values about the human and its situation. In the face of this “great unsettlement,” we see the rise of autocratic and populist national movements around the world attempting to shore up borders and restitute attachment to place, many of them animated by neo-traditionalist fantasies of renewal and restoration.

The Unsettlement Project brings together scholars and artists to think, carefully and boldly, about the earth and the human, and the shifting and mutually transforming relations between them. The project emerges from an earlier initiative hosed by the Committee on Global Thought focused on migration in Africa that aimed to dispel the false opposition between forced and voluntary movement in times of climate change and politico-economic precarity. 

The present iteration of this project remains concerned with mass migration and its consequences for the earth and nation-states, as well as the individuals uprooted by these processes. But it has also opened outwards, to include the effects of generative artificial intelligence, the rush to quantum computing and the processes that condition their possibility. Our interest lies with the interrelation among these forces, and with the historically specific social and cultural forms in which they are mediated and made available for critical engagement.

When Karl Polanyi described the “great transformation” of the industrial era—the production, by nation-states, of a globalizing market economy and the profound shift of mentalities it effected—he wrote with the advantage of hindsight. We aim to understand a similarly world-historic transformation in the midst of its unfolding. The Unsettlement Project is guided by a distinctly interdisciplinary sensibility, inflected by anthropological and artistic methods and questions.

It commences with the proposition that people who are actively engaged in reflection on emergent and vanishing phenomena—often artists and other practitioners of the imagination—can discern elements of transformation before they are fully visible to positive science or amenable to predictive models. Our approach permits a conceptualization of processes, structures and relations across the domains of economy, polity, and society—at different scales and over time, while recognizing that perceptions of scale and time are themselves relative and subject to metamorphosis by the forces we aim to understand.

With this broad and ambitious agenda in mind, The Unsettlement Project will host a series of themed workshops and conferences, as well as individual lectures and speaking events, regularly announced on this page. These activities will be organized under three main rubrics of unsettlement, to be pursued in parallel and their convergences: the “Unhomely Earth,” “Other Intelligences,” and “Unsettling Images: Perceiving Transformation.” 

In the service of educating ourselves, encouraging individual and collective research, and fomenting critically audacious scholarly and creative work, we will also launch both an online and print publication dedicated to imaginative analysis and creative interrogation of our great disorientation.