The Vera List Center for Art and Politics at The New School is pleased to invite applications for the 2020-2022 Vera List Center Fellowships. Three non-residential, two-year fellowships will be awarded to support scholarly and creative work that critically engages with the Vera List Center’s 2020-2022 biennial focus theme As for Protocols.
Explicitly—or not—protocols determine much of what we do. Far exceeding traditional notions of “good manners,” protocols are languages that regulate how people relate to each other, to their cultural, social, and political environments, and to the technologies that create them. They are indices of governmental, organizational, social, or corporate power structures. Protocols speak to processes, rather than finite outcomes. While often overlooked or invisible, they set the conditions for potential encounters. Investigating them as such will allow us to consider and help develop new protocols that counter-current hegemonies and are, instead, inclusive and equitable, ranging from computer interfaces, A.I., data aggregation, and algorithms to community agreements and culturally-specific engagement protocols to protocols undergirding scientific research. As “protocol” may also refer to documentation and minutes, the term signals a hybrid time frame of both the past and projection into the future. With the engagement of the Vera List Center Fellows as well as other artists, scholars, activists, and students, we will approach protocols as the foundations for the performance of living, and begin thinking and working toward new spaces of political empowerment.
The Vera List Center Fellowships support individuals whose work advances the discourse on art and politics. The appointments provide the opportunity to research and develop a project drawing from the curatorial, academic, and professional resources of the Vera List Center and The New School, and to bring the research and resulting work to the public through the Vera List Center’s interdisciplinary public programs and organizational networks.