Authoritarian Imaginaries
The themes of Authoritarian Imaginaries—the inaugural public event of A Counter-Imaginary in Authoritarian Times—originate from the understanding that building an effective counter-imaginary means addressing the issue of authoritarianism in a critical, shared, and multi-faceted manner.
Taking place at the University of Chicago on November 15, 2025, conference panels considered the libidinal investments in fascist politics, gender and the affective economies of authoritarianism, and how Palestine serves as a template for repressive politics in the United States.
As 3CT director Lisa Wedeen noted in her welcome remarks, “It is our hope that this event will identify some of the impediments we face in effectively resisting authoritarian logics so that we can begin to envisage ways to scale the impasses… The assault on higher education, in particular, is a disaster, but it’s also an opportunity to develop innovative modes of political judgement and novel diagnoses of the conditions and atmospheres that make justice and equity so elusive. It’s also an occasion to speak truth to power, as the familiar phrase would have it, to answer calls to courage, to label the intentional mass killing of civilians by its name, genocide, and to speak out about those genocides in Gaza and Sudan. It is also an invitation to think about how money and cruelty have come to dominate our American political environment. Our current circumstances, so resonant with fascism, also demand examining the antecedent conditions that have made possible this period of fear and suffering, of disappearances from the streets, of mass deportations, of everyday complicities, collusions, sycophancy, and new rhetorics of both disavowal and reavowal.”
Speakers included Nadia Abu El-Haj, Amahl Bishara, Gillian Branstetter, Judith Butler, Anton Ford, Jason Frank, Katherine Franke, Adom Getachew, Jacob Johanssen, Jane Junn, William Mazzarella, Robert Meister, Sianne Ngai, Brenda Tindal, Lisa Wedeen, and Linda Zerilli.
Introduction
Lisa Wedeen (University of Chicago)
Judith Butler (University of California, Berkeley)
Libidinal Investments in Fascist Politics
Jason Frank (Cornell University)
William Mazzarella (University of Chicago)
Lisa Wedeen (University of Chicago)
Moderator: Adom Getachew (University of Chicago)
In July 2026, Critical Inquiry published versions of these papers as a forum on their blog: read them here(opens in a new tab).
Gender and the Affective Economies of Authoritarianism
Jacob Johanssen (St Mary’s University, London)
Jane Junn (University of Southern California)
Moderator: Linda Zerilli (University of Chicago)
Palestine as Template for Repressive Politics in the US
Nadia Abu El-Haj (Columbia University)
Amahl Bishara (Tufts University)
Katherine Franke (Columbia University)
Moderator: Anton Ford (University of Chicago)
Closing Roundtable
Jacob Johanssen (St Mary’s University, London)
Jane Junn (University of Southern California)
Moderator: Linda Zerilli (University of Chicago)
The Chicago Center for Contemporary Theory—known as 3CT—is a space for the critical discussion and reimagination of social, political, and cultural processes in the world today. 3CT supports work that interrogates systems of power and value, that proposes methods and frameworks for making sense of recent events and ongoing transformations, and that demands that theory be relevant to the world we live in. In doing so, we foster an interdisciplinary community of scholars, students, and practitioners who produce new forms of theory that help to illuminate both what is and what could be.
