SPRING 2026

Doing Nothing/Nothing Doing

Modernity’s normative image of the human is that of an active agent who makes history, contests the prevailing state of affairs through action, and authors the future.  Beyond their longstanding attraction to moments of revolution and innovation, the humanities and social sciences continuously exert themselves to identify scenes of resistance, to resolve the contested dialectic between an insurgent agency and an oppressive structure, and to widen the modern conception of agency so as to project it onto ever-broader classes of entities, both human and non-human.  Recent invocations to “quiet quit,” nap, and sit with stillness mirror older practices of foot-dragging, the strike, and sabotage as strategies for slowing down the temporal machineries and extractive capacities of capitalism.  If one thing can be agreed upon, it is that doing nothing might now and then be the best thing to do.  Given this framing of the human in action in ordinary and scholarly thinking, this theme asks what, exactly, is the problem with doing nothing?  As the phrase “nothing doing” suggests, inactivity may signal an active refusal (rather than mere absence) of action, a critical negation of a transactional status quo, and thus a way out of constant anticipation or foreboding of something about to happen.  What might self-authoring, history-making agents learn from the loafers and apostates to capitalism?  What ethics of inaction, practices of self-subordination, and powers of stillness are worth thematizing and cultivating today? This semester’s bifold theme invites inquiries into the ethical, political, and aesthetic grammars of doing nothing and the (im)potent forms of resistant inactivity that provoke the always-hustling busy bodies of crisis-prone modernity.

Lectures 

All lectures begin at 5 p.m. in Room 100 of The Frank Center for Public Affairs unless otherwise noted.