Paper long abstract:

Mary N. Taylor is a militant researcher grounded in anthropology, urbanism and dialogical art, and currently the Assistant Director of the Center for Place, Culture, and Politics at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. Her research examines sites, techniques and politics of civic cultivation, social movement, and cultural management; the ethico-aesthetic cultivation of nationalism and cultural differentiation and the making of nation-states; and people’s movements in interwar, socialist and post-socialist East-Central Europe and the Balkans. Her book on folk dance revival, political personhood and state formation in Hungary, tentatively entitled Movement of the People: Folkdance, Populism and Citizenship in Hungary, is forthcoming in 2021 (Indiana University Press). Her praxis includes working with the internationalist East European platform LeftEast, and a related summer school hosted by different social movement formations in ‘postsocialist Eastern Europe;’ Brooklyn Laundry Social Club, an experiment in co-research in New York City laundromats, and Amenawon Solar School Initiative, a process of developing a neighborhood “green school” in Lagos, Nigeria. She has taught at Hunter College, the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art, and the Parsons School of Design.