What does it mean to think critically about the future? Not simply to imagine a horizon of possibility but to interrogate how futures are constructed, for whom, and at what cost?
The Humanities Research Center invites you to join our interdisciplinary conversations and programming addressing these and other questions as part of our 2026–2028 theme, Critical Futures. This theme invites inquiry into the stakes of futurity: as a site of contestation, a practice of imagination, and a demand for accountability.
Our aspiration is to promote collaborative scholarship, creation, and conversation that explore models of critical thinking about possible futures, probe the significance of a future-already-in-distress for our present critical and creative horizons, and contemplate the future prospects of critical and critically creative thought. We aim to foreground the humanities as a space for both pressing reflection and generative world-making: a laboratory for thinking otherwise and a catalyst for the formation of critical futures.
The HRC will activate this theme along two main axes:
- Curated programming: We will organize a series of conversations, panels, workshops, public lectures, and other programming that explore critical engagements with futurity across disciplines and practices, for both the Rice and the broader Houston community.
- Collaborative support: We will sponsor and co-sponsor interdisciplinary and collaborative events, creative projects, and experimental formats proposed by faculty, students, and groups whose work activates and engages with the theme.
We invite our community to join us in thinking with, through, and beyond Critical Futures to imagine together how critical humanistic and artistic inquiry can illuminate and build what lies ahead, and, in turn, reframe the urgencies of the present.
Apply for a Critical Futures grant here: https://hrc.rice.edu/theme/cfp.
Jeffery Gibson (b. 1972, Colorado Springs, Colorado) is a multidisciplinary contemporary artist who works in a wide range of media, including painting, beadwork, weaving, installation, video, andarchival practices. A citizen of the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians and of Cherokee descent, Gibson makes images and objects that are often a synthesis of canonical modernist aesthetics andindigenous aesthetics and art practices. His work also draws from queer culture, different global sub-cultures, and pop culture. In THE FUTURE IS PRESENT, Gibson declaratively states that present and future, like the forms of his weave-like text, are inextricably entwined. In combining elements of indigenous and modernist aesthetics, the artist raises the questions: when we imagine the future, who do we have in mind? Whom is this future for? What communities benefit, who or what gets left behind?
By Juan-Pablo Cajiga-Pena
Art Research Associate, Humanities Research Center (2025–26)