Welcome to The Thinking Cap, the interactive blog of the PICT Student Ambassador Program (SAP). Run entirely by university students from around the world, the SAP is a platform for students to debate issues in higher education, place them in specific social and political contexts, and share them with the broader PICT community.
The University in Uncertain Times: Toward a New Form of Life?
by Sanzhar Akayev (Moscow, Russia) Contemporary universities occupy an important yet peculiar place in our societies, serving as intersections of various intellectual, scientific, and economic
Dispatches: Performance in the Time of a Pandemic
Image: Carolee Schneemann, Up To And Including Her Limits (1973-76) by Jeanette Joy Harris (Texas, USA) COVID-19 has dramatically affected cultural life. Museums, galleries, theaters, and performance
Remembering Outrage: Reading Susan Sontag’s “AIDS and Its Metaphors” in the Age of COVID-19
by Nikolaas Deketelaere (Paris, France) We are more than a year into what the American poet Paul Monette (1945-1995) called “the calamity,” referring to the
What’s Left? On the Prohibition of Language: An Interview with Samir Gandesha
Image: Claire Fontaine, “They Hate Us For Our Freedom” (2008) by Emily Laurent-Monaghan This conversation with Samir Gandesha, public intellectual and professor of Humanities at
Review: Giacometti and Beckett: Between Failure and Theatricality
by Maureen Winter (Paris, France) The Giacometti Foundation’s current exhibition, “Giacometti/Beckett – Rater encore. Rater mieux” (January 9th-June 8th, 2021), pairs the celebrated sculptor’s post-surrealist works
Dispatches from Portugal and the Philippines: Notes on Student Pandemic Life
by Robert Junqueira and Hadje Cresencio Sadje Ⅰ. Portugal Against COVID-19: The Case of the University of Coimbra As a student at the Institute for