In Conversation
Erica Chito Childs speaks on race, desire, identity, public higher education, and the power of the humanities to make sense of a turbulent world.
Some ideas belong on the page. Others need a room.
Drawing on nearly three decades of global research and a lifetime of navigating the borders she has spent her career studying, her talks are rigorous, personal, and memorable.
Below are topics on which she speaks and recent talks she has given. To inquire about availability or to invite Dean Chito Childs to speak at your institution, organization, or event, please reach out at Contact.
Hierarchies of Desire: Race, Power, and the Politics of Who We Are Taught to Want
When nationalism surges; borders tighten; and racial, ethnic, and religious ideologies are broadcast across the globe; who we love becomes a political act. The intimate choices we make about whom to marry, whom to raise children with, and even whom to sleep with become sites of intense social regulation, political debate, and public scrutiny. Mixed unions that cross racial, ethnic, religious, national, and other socially constructed boundaries have always been sites of struggle over belonging, identity, and the boundaries of family and community themselves.
Reinforcing a nation's formal and informal laws, the family sits at the dinner table and decides who belongs. The simplest way to understand a group's position in a society is to ask someone from the dominant group how they would feel if their child came home with a partner from a specific racial, ethnic, or religious group different from their own. In these stories, we learn exactly who is considered marriageable and who is considered disposable. The family acts as a first line of defense and enforces the rules against mixing before any border patrol or immigration law ever gets the chance. This hierarchy of desirability has far-reaching implications beyond intimacy and marriage, because there is an obsession with and fear of mixing that impacts not only how we view mixed couples, but also how we form relationships across racial and ethnic lines more broadly.
Humanities x Tech: Who Gets to Shape Artificial Intelligence and What Happens When We Get It Wrong?
Much of the conversation in higher education around AI involves how we will respond. Yet, the more important question is who gets to shape it, and whether universities are preparing students to be its architects rather than its subjects. Our answer to that question at Hunter College-CUNY is HUMANities x Tech, a year-long interdisciplinary series bringing together faculty from computer science, philosophy, sociology, film and media, music, Japanese studies, art and more to explore, interrogate, and reimagine emerging technology through the lens of cultural knowledge, creative expression and social justice.
-
The series serves as the proof of concept for a new interdisciplinary major currently in development, grounded in the conviction that technological systems are cultural systems, and that the most important questions about AI are not engineering problems but human ones. The major will pair computational literacy with storytelling, ethical reasoning, and interpretive analysis grounded in the Humanities/Arts/Social sciences.
To end, we will share what we have learned at our large urban public university serving majority first-generation students of color, arguing that public institutions are uniquely positioned to lead that work. Our students carry the lived knowledge of what it means to be shaped by systems not built for them. Therefore, by grounding AI education in the humanities, we identify structural solutions that higher education has been looking for.
The World We Share: Co-Creation, Community, and the Democratic Future of Public Higher Education
Higher education is under continuous and mounting pressure from geopolitical instability, technological disruption, and coordinated attacks on research funding, the humanities, and diversity and equity initiatives. While many universities have taken a defensive stance, the most politically powerful response available to universities is to be transformative. It is at this moment that we need to ask what it means for public universities to take seriously their role as custodians and co-creators of our shared world, and as community-rooted institutions accountable to the people they exist to serve?
Drawing on the experience of a large, diverse public urban university serving one of the most economically, racially, and culturally heterogeneous cities in the world, I argue that we need to examine and reimagine the university as a site of genuine community co-creation, public debate, and democratic renewal. When we think about the future of higher education globally, what strategies can we use for a replicable model of publicly engaged higher education?
-
Emerging institutional practices that have worked include faculty-community partnership series that make visible and celebrate publicly engaged scholarship; humanities initiatives that center human values, ethics, and narrative combined with emerging technology; co-creation forums that provide space for faculty, students, and community stakeholders to dialogue and build equal partnerships; cluster hiring strategies designed to build interdisciplinary and community-rooted collaboration; and curriculum innovations that prepare students to engage critically and ethically with the challenges of their time.
These practices are not solely innovative programming but rather represent a theory of knowledge and institutional governance that is collaborative rather than extractive. Taken together, it pushes the institution to be publicly accountable rather than institutionally self-serving, and to serve the communities of its students. Even in difficult times, the university has to remain a space for public debate, and an active driver of social transformation.
By focusing on community need, we can remain committed to rigorous analysis of what genuinely transformative institutions actually do and continue to develop sound policy recommendations.
Connecting the urban American public university context to global conversations about the political roles of universities, this conversation situates the anchor institution and co-creation model within broader international debates about the future of public higher education.
Kissed by Klimt: Identity, Belonging, and the Meanings We Make
Dean Chito Childs grew up in a working-class home where her mother kept gold and what some would call gaudy knickknacks safely enshrined within her beloved glass cristaleira. To her mom, these were sacred treasures. When Childs first saw a poster of Gustav Klimt's The Kiss in a mall store, she was enchanted and remembers falling in love, the way you feel when you finally find someone or something that speaks your language. That poster hung in her room through high school, college, and into graduate school, until she could finally afford a slightly more sophisticated print from IKEA.
In her mind, The Kiss always belonged to her, a beautiful mix of her mother’s gold and a representation of her own interracial teen romance. Yet, it would take three degrees and a sabbatical before she felt she belonged in the Belvedere gallery in Vienna where the actual painting hangs.
Art historians have written about The Kiss as a universal symbol of romantic love and human connection. But what does it mean that a painting declared universal speaks so differently to different people?
-
How does this painting hanging in a gilded frame in Vienna get read as an interracial couple by one young girl in California while reimagined as a symbol of resistance by an artist from a marginalized community around the world, and still understood in countless other ways by the millions who have stood before it? What makes a work of art feel like yours? Who gets to decide what it means? And what happens when people who were never supposed to see themselves in the masterpiece find themselves there anyway?
In this talk, Dean Chito Childs explores the global obsession with Klimt's The Kiss and the very different meanings the painting holds for different people. Drawing on conversations with scholars who study Klimt, artists who have reimagined The Kiss in their own work, and the art lovers who travel to Vienna for a glimpse, she connects her own decades long journey and love affair with the painting to make the case that art becomes truly accessible not when institutions open their doors but when people find their own reflection inside it.
She examines how race, class, gender, and lived experience shape the way we encounter, interpret, and claim works of art, especially those most famous pieces and why the meanings that come from outside the art world might be the most important to understand. The painting does not change but the meanings we make of it can reveal so much about who we are and what we have been taught to believe we deserve.