Monday Seminar:
Kennan Ferguson
UW System Fellow (2020-2021)
Political Science, UW-Milwaukee
Isn’t creativity an unalloyed good? Contemporary America assumes that creativity should be everywhere encouraged, that it is the only way that people come to most truly be themselves, that it alone stands against the tides of generalized mediocrity, social uniformity, corporate capitalism, and even urban decay. But what if creativity has its own dangers? What lurks within the unproblematic embrace of the creative mode? And what alternatives does creativity foreclose?
Kennan Ferguson teaches political theory at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. He is the author, most recently, of Cookbook Politics (University of Pennsylvania). Previous books include All in the Family: Community and Incommensurability (Duke) and The Politics of Judgment (Lexington), as well as the edited volumes After Capitalism (Rutgers) with Patrice Petro, and the forthcoming The Big No (Minnesota). Ferguson currently coedits the journal Theory & Event (2015-2020) and the book series Modernity and Political Thought, and previously co-edited the 8-volume Blackwell Encyclopedia of Political Thought. Since 2016, he has served on the Faculty Committee of the University of Wisconsin Press. He was Director of the Center for 21st Century Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee from 2015-2017.
[Due to COVID-19, this event has been moved to a digital conferencing platform. To participate please send an email with your name, university affiliation, and how you heard about the event to IRH at info@irh.wisc.edu.]