Diasporican Cultural Research Summit II

If you’re a scholar, artist, editor, archivist, cultural worker, and public intellectuals interested in artistic practices, this event is for you! After an incredibly successful Diasporican Cultural Summit in June 2025 convening artists, arts administrators, curators, and more across the country, the Diasporican Cultural Summit is returning with a two-day academic and cultural convening focused on arts research. The program combines scholarly presentations with methodological exchanges and publication-oriented activities following a collaboration as a method model.

This event is happening alongside La Feria Internacional del Libro de la Ciudad de Nueva York (FILNYC) organized by the Mexican Studies Institute. Come for the books, stay for the discourse!

Info: The Arts & Culture Unit at CENTRO aims to reimagine and expand Puerto Rican Studies through artistic practice, cultural production, and interdisciplinary collaboration. The team will share its vision, methodology, research priorities, and current projects, highlighting how arts and culture can function as critical tools for scholarship, public engagement, and community-centered knowledge production.

Info:
This plenary brings together public intellectuals working across museums, artistic practice, publishing, podcasts, community engagement, and cultural institutions to reflect on the democratization of cultural knowledge. Through their diverse experiences, panelists will discuss how intersections of race, class, education, and access continue to shape who produces, circulates, and engages cultural discourse. The conversation proposes a model of public and popular knowledge rooted in accessibility, community accountability, and decolonial cultural work, foregrounding ongoing efforts to make culture, research, and critical thought more widely available beyond traditional academic spaces.

Info: This panel examines the growing role of social media and other non-traditional academic platforms as critical spaces for cultural discourse, research dissemination, and public knowledge production. In a contemporary landscape saturated with content, panelists will reflect on how digital platforms can move beyond immediacy and visibility to create meaningful, research-informed engagement that expands public access to culture. The conversation will explore strategies for producing accessible yet rigorous cultural content while navigating questions of audience, credibility, representation, and the democratization of knowledge in digital spaces.

Info: This panel introduces CENTRO’s publication initiatives and their evolving role in shaping and expanding Puerto Rican Studies through decolonial scholarship and accessible cultural discourse. The conversation will highlight the CENTRO Journal, one of the leading publications in Puerto Rican Studies with nearly four decades of history, alongside the recently revitalized Centro Press and its new editorial collections responding to emerging conversations and needs within the field. The session will also explore the role of RicanWritings, CENTRO’s digital magazine platform, as a more agile and responsive space for contemporary cultural analysis, public scholarship, and day-to-day engagement with Puerto Rican and diasporic life.

Info: This panel explores how archival practices and research methodologies shape artistic production, cultural scholarship, and diasporic knowledge-making across books, films, exhibitions, and other cultural forms. Grounded in the understanding that the histories and experiences of the global majority have often been excluded from mainstream narratives and institutional archives, the conversation will reflect on the urgent need to trace, preserve, and document these histories through community-centered and decolonial approaches. Panelists will discuss archives not only as repositories of memory, but as active forces for cultural recovery, creative practice, and the production of new diasporic research.

Info: Joey Quiñones is a fiber artist, ceramicist, and mixed media sculptor. Their work focuses on African American and Caribbean history, specifically queer, Afro-Puerto Rican identity. Their work has been shown nationally and internationally at venues such as the Palais de Tokyo, Manifest Gallery, the Akron Art Museum, the Crocker Museum, the Shepherd, the Elaine L. Jacob Gallery, the Winterthur Museum, and The Sculpture Center. They have an MFA in Studio Art from Indiana University, Bloomington, and a Ph.D. in English from the University of Iowa. They have had residencies at Vermont Studio Center, the Winterthur Museum, Garden, and Library, and the Arts/Industry residency in Foundry at the John Michael Kohler Arts Center. They are currently the Artist-in-Residence/Head of the Fiber Department at Cranbrook Academy of Art in Bloomfield Hills, MI.

Event venue & nearby stays

John Jay College of Criminal Justice, 524 West 59th Street, New York, United States

Concerts, fests, parties, meetups — all the happenings, one place.

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