CUNY Gittell Public Scholar Book Writing Workshop 2026

December 4, 2025December 4, 2025 | gittellcollective78b05ea6e0

The CUNY Gittell Collective is launching a fourth year of its Public Scholar Workshop Program. It aims to provide CUNY faculty with the support and feedback infrastructures to write and publish great first books. We acknowledge that the resources provided by book workshops– negotiated deadlines, peer camaraderie and accountability, and feedback from field/subfield experts and esteemed interlocutors– are often informally distributed, inaccessible or intimidating for scholars from historically marginalized communities, or codified and available at only certain well-resourced universities. Three to four awardees will receive support to organize a virtual book workshop in summer 2026.

A $4,000 award will be used to provide four expert reviewers an honorarium ($1,000 each) for their participation in the workshops. This workshop aims to help CUNY faculty in political science, sociology, anthropology, urban studies, and related disciplines to advance book manuscripts.

We especially encourage applications from scholars whose book projects focus on issues related to cities, social justice, community participation and development, political engagement and social movements, and democratic governance, both domestically and abroad, and/or those that draw upon some aspect of community-based research and related methodologies, with the aim of combining knowledge and action for policy or social change. This program was inspired by a Book Workshop project run as a partnership between John Jay College-CUNY, Howard University, and the University of Maryland, developed by Professors Niambi Carter (UMD) and Heath Brown (JJC CUNY). This version is sponsored by the Gittell Urban Studies Collective at the CUNY Graduate Center, co-led by Drs. Celina Su and Heath Brown, and co-coordinated/organized by Dr. Selen Güler (sguler@gc.cuny.edu).

Eligibility

This workshop is designed for CUNY-affiliated faculty, whether full-time or part-time, who can share a completed draft of a first book manuscript by May 1, 2026. While applications from junior faculty (tenure-track or adjunct) will be prioritized, applications from senior faculty will also be considered if applicants 1. Wish to workshop their first book and 2. Agree to participate in a facilitated discussion mentoring junior faculty in the program.

Timeline of meetings

Awardees will meet as a cohort, to share plans for their respective book projects, in early February 2026. A second potential meeting may take place around spring break; this meeting would be an opportunity for awardees to share a portion of an introduction or a book proposal and to receive some feedback. Awardees will meet with 4 reviewers in a virtual workshop to receive feedback on their book manuscript in June 2026.

Application deadline

11:59 pm on Tuesday, January 20, 2026. The application form is available here: https://forms.gle/EbLQxtQq634NTyra7

CUNY Gittell Public Scholar Book Writing Workshop 2025

December 3, 2024January 14, 2025 | gittellcollective78b05ea6e0

The CUNY Gittell Collective is launching a third year of its Public Scholar Workshop Program. It aims to provide CUNY faculty with the support and feedback infrastructures to write and publish great first books. We acknowledge that the resources provided by book workshops– negotiated deadlines, peer camaraderie and accountability, and feedback from field/subfield experts and esteemed interlocutors– are often informally distributed, inaccessible or intimidating for scholars from historically marginalized communities, or codified and available at only certain well-resourced universities. Up to three awardees will receive support to organize a virtual book workshop in summer 2025.

A $3,000 award will be used to provide four expert reviewers an honorarium for their participation in the workshops. This workshop aims to help CUNY faculty in political science, sociology, anthropology, urban studies, and related disciplines to advance book manuscripts.

Eligibility

This workshop is designed for CUNY-affiliated faculty, whether full-time or part-time, who can share a completed draft of a first book manuscript by May 2, 2025. While applications from junior faculty (tenure-track or adjunct) will be prioritized, applications from senior faculty will also be considered if applicants 1. Wish to workshop their first book and 2. Agree to participate in a facilitated discussion mentoring junior faculty in the program.

Timeline of meetings

Awardees will meet as a cohort, to share plans for their respective book projects, in late January 2025. A second potential meeting may take place around spring break; this meeting would be an opportunity for awardees to share a portion of an introduction or a book proposal and to receive some feedback. Awardees will meet with 4 reviewers in a virtual workshop to receive feedback on their book manuscript in June 2025.

Application deadline

11:59 pm on Monday, January 17, 2025. The application form is available here: https://forms.gle/EbLQxtQq634NTyra7

Geopoetics workshop series

May 27, 2024January 27, 2026 | Kahina Meziant

The Geopoetics workshop series consisted of four convenings between September 2023 and April 2024. It brought together poet-scholars and early career researchers to practice geopoetics as a living methodology at the intersection of the humanities and social sciences, keeping in mind questions of epistemic justice. Across the series, participants worked with pieces of empirical data in hand (objects, transcripts, field notes, spreadsheets) through specific writing exercises and the exquisite corpse method, in order to practice collective qualitative methods. By spending time with one another’s data, participants practiced what it means to hold research as collective rather than proprietary, experimental rather than fixed, to surface new themes and conversations across datasets.

Feminists and postcolonial scholars–from Saidiya Hartman’s critical fabulation to Christina Sharpe’s atmospheric writing, Kathleen Stewart’s attunement to the ordinary–have long shown that the manner in which we gather information through the research process is not always conscious. Much happens just below the surface of awareness in the relations we establish during fieldwork.

The series began in in September 2023 with an exploratory Zoom session among poet-scholars—Sahar Romani, Monica de la Torre, Richa Nagar, Celina Su, and Kendra Sullivan—working at the intersection of the humanities and social sciences with an epistemic justice orientation. By March 2024, the group reconvened in person to write with data together, treating geopoetics as affective attunement: listening across languages, disciplines, and positions, allowing multiple voices to compose what no single author could write alone.

In parallel, two additional encounters convened PhD candidates in Human Geography and Environmental Psychology interested in similar questions from within their disciplinary training—Anna Schlenz, Simone Parker, Irina Shirobokova, Clairette Atri, and Natalia Lara Gonzalez. Through collaborative mapping and creative constraints, we explored how arbitrary rules–when acknowledged rather than naturalized–can generate new ways of seeing, and how disassembling academic forms must be paired with reassembling them into something new.

The final convening in April deepened these threads around generative bounds and language as world-making, drawing on Erin Manning’s “minor gestures”—the smallest movements that transform how language is experienced and enacted. Participants proposed continued explorations of embodied methods going forward: participatory mapping, choreographic inquiry, and creative constraints as guides rather than restrictions.