Fictive Witness

Legal scholar Kendall Thomas's lecture-performance focused on the U.S. cultural and political powers of the "imaginary" American presidency. Drawing inspiration from the visual landscape of Save the Presidents, Thomas's performance used words, music, and an eclectic range of references to stage an encounter between two presidencies and two conflicting and convergent visions of the so-called American Dream.

For "On the Imaginary Domain, Or Who Gets to Be a Person?" philosopher Drucilla Cornell unpacked her notion of ethical feminism as a theoretical concept and political strategy. Cornell's performance centered on labor, gender politics in the workplace, and the right of each person to identify in their own way. Her lecture served as a contrast to the content of the film, pointing to the absence of women within the lineage of presidents who conceived of and were employed to shape American national identity throughout its history.

Architectural theorist Mabel O. Wilson's lecture-performance centered on a series of alphabetical entries relating to land, property, and personhood within American ideology. As the film screened, Wilson presented a colonial history of how the American landscape was cultivated, specifically referring to the use of enslaved labor to build national monuments that purport to embody "freedom." The lecture examined how these intertwined histories of land, race, and nation continue to shape the American imaginary.

Sociologist Alex S. Vitale and historian Nikhil Pal Singh's lecture-performance examined the histories of policing in the United States in relation to race, presidential power, and the call to defund the police. The lecture explored the historic and contemporary relationship between domestic policing, U.S. foreign policy, and imperial expansionism and military intervention.

Education scholar Noliwe Rooks' lecture-performance Accounting for Integration examined the settler-colonial origins of the U.S. public school system, beginning with Indigenous histories and Indian boarding schools before tracing the emotional and psychological costs of integration across lines of race, ethnicity, and class. The lecture concluded with a conversation featuring student activist Whitney Stephenson, co-founder of Teens Take Charge, a student-led organization advocating for the desegregation of New York City's public schools.

Native Studies scholar Shari Huhndorf's lecture-performance Monuments, Memory, and the Art of Indigenous History examined how U.S. monuments create celebratory national narratives premised on Indigenous erasure. Through the work of Native artists, Huhndorf considered how official histories can be revised to counter Indigenous erasure and assert contemporary claims in the context of the Dakota Access Pipeline protests. The lecture argued that contests over the meaning of the past are also contests over land and political power in the present.