Welcome

A Conference at Princeton University

September 27-28, 2019

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, a generation of young Americans sought to create lives and build communities which were outside of mainstream American norms and practices. They looked in new directions for spiritual fulfillment, experimented with communal living arrangements, pushed back against established practices, challenged notions of expertise, and offered tools for living which simultaneously embraced technological innovation and rued modernity. Their ideas, aspirations, and experiences were varied and took many different forms. Collectively, however, they created a “counterculture.”

The “counterculture” was a formidable site of intellectual production and political debate, and an important part of the larger and longer history of twentieth-century American intellectual and political life. It included a rethinking of social organization — the role of individual autonomy, community, and collectivism — a grappling with science, economics, and democracy; a challenge to patriarchal authority; a questioning of professional expertise; a critique of capitalism (as well as a defense of alternative capitalisms); a push for environmental conscientiousness; and a reconsideration of the boundaries of freedom.

This two-day conference aims to take the counterculture seriously. What influenced and shaped the ideas of the counterculture? What realities did the counterculture aim to recreate? What did it mean to participate in the counterculture? How should we think about the legacy of the counterculture in this moment?

The conference reexamines well-known events, persons, and movements, and explores themes long-forgotten, never discovered, and obfuscated by the larger historical narrative, in an effort to write the counterculture back into it.

Schedule

All panels convene in Dickinson Hall, Room 211

Friday, September 27, 2019

1:30 – 2:15 p.m.
Panel 1

In Search of a Countercultural Moment: A Discussion

  • Dov Weinryb Grohsgal

    • Associate Research Scholar
    • Columbia University
  • Hendrik Hartog

    • Class of 1921 Bicentennial Professor in the History of American Law and Liberty, Emeritus
    • Professor of History, Emeritus
    • Princeton University
2:15 – 3:45 p.m.
Panel 2

An Economy of Tools and Knowledge

  • Daniel T. Rodgers

    • Henry Charles Lea Professor of History, Emeritus
    • Princeton University
    • Comment
  • Margot Canaday

    • Professor of History
    • Princeton University
    • Chair
  • Erik Baker

    • Doctoral Candidate, Department of the History of Science
    • Harvard University
    • “Access to Tools: Stewart Brand and the Countercultural Work Ethic”
  • Meredith Gaglio

    • Visiting Assistant Professor of Art History
    • Swarthmore College
    • “‘One Highly-Evolved Toolbox’: Soft-Tech and the Eco-technological Legacy of the Whole Earth Catalog
  • Heidi Morefield

    • Postdoctoral Research Associate, Global Health Program, Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs
    • Princeton University
    • “Small is Beautiful: Appropriate Technology, International Development, and the American Counterculture”
4:30 – 6:30 p.m.
Keynote Address
McCosh Hall, Room 50

Frances Moore Lappé, author of Diet for a Small Planet

  • “Small Planet, Big Crises, and Hope Through Democratic Action”
  • Dov Weinryb Grohsgal

    • Associate Research Scholar
    • Columbia University
    • Introduction
  • Anne Anlin Cheng

    • Professor of English and American Studies
    • Director, Program in American Studies
    • Princeton University
    • Introduction

Saturday, September 28, 2019

9 – 10:30 a.m.
Panel 3

Movements and Alliances

  • Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor

    • Assistant Professor of African American Studies & Charles H. Mciwain University Preceptor
    • Princeton University
    • Comment
  • Judith Weisenfeld

    • Agate Brown and George L. Collord Professor of Religion
    • Chair, Department of Religion
    • Princeton University
    • Chair
  • Ray Arsenault

    • John Hope Franklin Professor of Southern History
    • University of South Florida St. Petersburg
    • “The Mahatma Invades America: CORE, Martin Luther King Jr. and the Movement Culture of Nonviolent Direct Action”
  • Andrew Hannon

    • Lecturer
    • University of Massachusetts Boston
    • “The San Francisco Diggers and the Lost Legacy of Performance and Radical Politics”
10:50 a.m. – 12:20 p.m.
Panel 4

Scarcity and Abundance

  • Alison Isenberg

    • Professor of History
    • Princeton University
    • Comment
  • William Gleason

    • Hughes-Rogers Professor of English and American Studies
    • Princeton University
    • Chair
  • Sharon Haar

    • Professor of Architecture, Taubman College
    • University of Michigan
    • “‘We Have to Be Able to Do It for Ourselves:’ The Community Design Movement and Its Conflicted History”
  • Kevin Rose

    • Doctoral Candidate, Department of Religious Studies
    • University of Virginia
    • “‘We’re Doing Something That Runs Counter to Society’: Mainstreaming Lappé Through the More-With-Less Cookbook”
  • Nicole Sackley

    • Associate Professor of History and American Studies
    • University of Richmond
    • “Food for People, Not for Profits: Countercultural Legacies and the Politics of Global Hunger and Development in the 1970s”
2 – 3:30 p.m.
Panel 5

Expertise and Radical Cultures

  • Elizabeth Mitchell Armstrong

    • Associate Professor of Sociology and Public Affairs, Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs
    • Princeton University
    • Comment
  • Hendrik Hartog

    • Class of 1921 Bicentennial Professor in the History of American Law and Liberty, Emeritus
    • Professor of History, Emeritus
    • Princeton University
    • Chair
  • Katherine McClain Fleming

    • Princeton University ’19
    • Princeton Project 55 Fellow
    • Chicago Volunteer Legal Services
    • “Bridges, Borders, and Burdens: Latinas Navigate Our Bodies, Ourselves
  • Marci Kwon

    • Assistant Professor of Art History
    • Stanford University
    • “Carlos Villa’s Other Sources”
  • Mark Tushnet

    • William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Law
    • Harvard Law School
    • “‘Rock ‘n Roll’ and ‘Roll Over Beethoven’: Tom Stoppard and Critical Legal Studies”
3:50 – 5:20 p.m.
Panel 6

Anxiety and Spirituality

  • Peter Wirzbicki

    • Assistant Professor of History
    • Princeton University
    • Comment
  • Aisha M. Beliso-De Jesús

    • Professor of Spanish and Portuguese and American Studies
    • Acting Associate Director, Program in American Studies, 2019-20
    • Princeton University
    • Chair
  • Jason Fitzgerald

    • Postdoctoral Associate, Department of Theatre Arts
    • University of Pittsburgh
    • “Countercultural Humanism: A Recovery and Critique”
  • Matthew Hedstrom

    • Associate Professor of Religious Studies and American Studies
    • University of Virginia
    • “Planetary Citizens: Building Global Consciousness and Spiritual Cosmopolitanism in the 1970s”
  • Sam Lebovic

    • Associate Professor and Director of the Ph.D. Program, Department of History and Art History
    • George Mason University
    • “Satellites of Love: Simultaneity, Globality, and the Audio-Visual in Sixties Counterculture”
5:40 – 6:30 p.m.

Closing Discussion and Remarks