Building on recent collaborative, international conversations about the conditions and possibilities for interdisciplinarity under current and emerging structures and strategies of the public university, this symposium hopes to contribute to this critical discussion by identifying and crafting new questions for reimagining (and reclaiming, if necessary) interdisciplinarity. Our keynote speakers will take up the question of interdisciplinarity as an intellectual quandary and a structural dilemma.  Through such concepts as assemblage and affinity, we invite critique of the certainties required for simple comparison --discreteness, distinctiveness, discontinuity – as well as new approaches for productive inquiry. And, under the intertwined contexts of disciplines under crisis, what appears to be a re-disciplinization (as the conveners of The University Beyond Crisis at CUNY have identified), and a neoliberalizing public university, we hope to illuminate pathways for articulating new arrangements in the intellectual and institutional spaces we inhabit. How then do we create the conditions for these new forms and inquiries to emerge from within our interdisciplines?

Our invited speakers include Ruth Nicole Brown, Kandice Chuh, Wesley Chrichlow, Jodi Melamed, Suzanne Oboler, and María Josefina Saldaña-Portillo. Graduate student respondents include S. Moon Cassinelli, Stephen Hocker, Sheri Lewis, and T.J. Tallie.

More information about our symposium, including the program schedule, can be found here: http://assemblagesandaffinities.weebly.com