This collection of essays started its life as the conference “Critical Theory in Critical Times,” held at Northwestern University, May 2–4, 2014. Neither the conference nor this volume would have been possible without the generous support of the Equality Development and Globalization Studies program at Northwestern’s Buffett Institute for Global Studies. Additional support at Northwestern was provided by the departments of Communication Studies, Philosophy, Political Science, Religious Studies, and Sociology; the Alice Kaplan Institute for the Humanities; the Center for Global Culture and Communication; and the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences’ Edith Kreeger Wolf Endowment. Important support was also provided by the Goethe Institute of Chicago and the Excellence Cluster on the Formation of Normative Orders at Goethe University Frankfurt. We extend our warm thanks to these many partners, and to Jasmine Hatten, Ozge Kocak, Mara Weber, and, particularly, Tara Sadera for their extremely professional and engaged assistance. We are grateful also to our colleagues at Northwestern, especially those who acted as respondents and chairs, whose support was crucial to the success of the conference, and to an extraordinary audience, whose questions and comments generated a lively discussion throughout the sessions. We extend our gratitude also to the many graduate and undergraduate students, especially those affiliated with Northwestern’s Critical Theory Cluster, who supported the conference. We are particularly grateful to Carlos Pereira Di Salvo for his superb editing of this volume. Finally, our warm thanks to Wendy Lochner, Christine Dunbar, Amy Allen, Todd Manza, all those involved in the volume’s acceptance and production at Columbia University Press, and, of course, to the volume’s contributors for their participation and help in bringing this project to fruition.