[DEADLINE EXTENDED] LOOK! : a graduate student workshop 

Institute for the Study of Sexuality and Gender
Columbia University

April 17–18, 2026

Frantz Fanon’s seminal essay “The Lived Experience of the Black Man” begins with an imperative: “Look!” This command cascades through the essay, exploding Fanon’s prose as both a mode of violence and a demand for recognition. Pinned by the white child’s look, Fanon is transformed into an “object among other objects” and denied the reciprocal recognition that might otherwise establish him as a subject. In turn, he converts himself into an object of knowledge, inhabiting the very terms by which he was seen: “Since the Other was reluctant to recognize me, there was only one answer: to make myself known.” This tension between looking and knowing strikes at the heart of a Western philosophical tradition that has long conflated visibility with truth — and it is here that Fanon’s essay becomes a critical site through which we might better apprehend the sedimented aesthetic logics that underwrite our contemporary order.

In this graduate student workshop, we take up the politics and ethics of looking, with particular attention to the aesthetic, historical, and racial grammars that shape visual perception. What are the effects of looking and being looked at? What forms of power—racial, sexual, gendered, colonial—are implicit in the event when one is hailed to look or hailed by a look? How does looking differ from seeing, gazing, or staring? How might we understand a look as distinct from the gaze? What are the historical and epistemic conditions under which looking is possible, prohibited, or compelled? And what forms of refusal, opacity, or self-fashioning emerge when the objects of perception look back?

This workshop aims to bring together participants across fields spanning (but not limited to)  literary studies, Black studies, art history, film & media studies, cultural theory, studies in gender & sexuality, theater and performance studies, disability studies, and aesthetic philosophy. We are especially interested in work that engages:

• the shifting grammars of looking across aesthetic, archival, or historical contexts;

• the visuality of race, gender, and sexuality;

• practices of witnessing, spectatorship, and surveillance;

• opacity, refusal, and practices of looking away;

• looking as interpellation, address, or demand;

• the relationship between surface, style, and embodied perception;

• the ethics and politics of being rendered visible or invisible.

The workshop will be held at Columbia University on April 17th and 18th, 2026, and it will include research panel conversations, a writing workshop, a museum tour, and more. All participants will be asked to circulate a 10-page paper prior to the event, and each research roundtable will begin with an 8-minute overview of your paper, followed by a faculty-moderated discussion.

To apply, please submit a 300-word abstract and a 100-word biography to look.issgworkshop@gmail.com by January 31. In the spirit of shared inquiry and sustained conversation, we ask that you only apply if you can commit to attending the entire workshop.