Equity, Diversity, and Student-Centered Pedagogy Across the Disciplines

One of the Futures Initiative’s key program areas are a unique set of interdisciplinary, inter-institutional team-taught courses. To date, the Futures Initiative has supported more than 40 team-taught courses at the CUNY Graduate Center. We’ve partnered with CUNY campuses in all boroughs and have had team-taught courses with CUNY’s professional schools, such as CUNY School of Law and the CUNY School of Public Health.

Each year, we select proposals from faculty across CUNY to inspire students with interdisciplinary and innovative courses. Our team-taught courses provide opportunities for faculty to learn from each other and their students in a more equitable learning-teaching arrangement. For students, courses are structured to support the connections between the three pillars of higher education: research, teaching, and service to society. In addition to connecting faculty members from multiple CUNY colleges, by focusing on graduate pedagogy and ways doctoral students can apply student-centered methods in their own classrooms, the courses create renewed possibilities for graduate students to consider their dual role as learners and instructors.

Our Team-Taught courses pair one central line CUNY Graduate Center faculty member and one CUNY faculty member based at another two or four-year college, many of whom have not previously had the opportunity to teach at the GC. To create a more equitable faculty exchange, FI provides a course buy-out to support the campus faculty member’s involvement, working through Provosts on both campuses. These collaborative efforts create unique, interdisciplinary learning opportunities for both students and instructors. 

Goals of Futures Initiative Team-Taught Courses

• Diversity is a key goal of Futures Initiative courses, both in terms of who is teaching, what they teach, and how they teach it. Our FI courses are committed to inclusiveness in all of its forms.
• The Futures Initiative is especially interested in supporting diverse pairs of scholars from the GC and other CUNY colleges, including senior and junior faculty members who have not taught at the GC previously. We hope to support graduate courses in any field that (1) have equity, diversity, inclusion, and innovation built into the course design and that (2) dedicate some of the course to graduate student teaching methods and translation of specialized research for a wider public.
• Critical pedagogy is another FI goal. FI courses include active, engaged learning, experiential learning, project-centered learning, both to offer graduate students the chance to develop as independent thinkers and to try out methods they might also use in the introductory courses they teach across the CUNY system.
• A social equity component—relating course material to social issues, modeling higher education as a public good—is another important factor.

Fall 2026 Courses

Performing Futurities

IDS 81640 / WSCP 81000

Co-Taught by Anaar Desai-Stephens (GC, Music) and RaShelle Peck (BMCC, Ethnic and Race Studies)

This course investigates the ever-contested category of “the future” through the lens of performance, performativity, and embodied praxis. We ask: What might different futures look, feel, and sound like? Which actors shape futures, and who gets to have a future? When “the future” is under contestation, how might forms of performance – from the spectacular to the daily quotidian – serve as sites for the articulation, negotiation, and even refusal of certain futures? Drawing on scholarship from performance studies, anthropology, Black critical studies, feminist studies, and more, we will critically engage questions regarding temporality, ephemerality, and iterativeness while examining the role of affects such as hope, anticipation, pessimism, and doubt in the study of futurities. Work on South Asian, Black, and Indigenous futurities, in particular, will guide us in considering how differently sited lineages have imagined alternative anti-racist and anti-capitalist societies.

Alongside our reading and discussion, we will experiment with creative embodied praxis as methods of thinking and feeling otherwise. Through creative writing, embodiment, movement, sounding, and other modalities, we will catalyze our own radical imaginations. This course thus offers daily practices of imagining, dreaming, and experimenting as forms of intellectual praxis that are crucial to the production of the futures we want to bring into being.

Spring 2026 Courses

PAST COURSES

View our course archive for a complete list of past courses, or explore the websites and posts below: