Introduction: The Witch Institute

In August 2021, The Witch Institute came to life as a seven-day virtual symposium to address the figure of the witch in art and media. For its duration, the symposium served as a collaborative meeting space for emerging and established voices, all of whom were responding to increasingly conservative political climates through critical, intersectional, and multi-modal engagements with the figure of the witch. This issue of PUBLIC represents some of these responses. In this introduction, symposium organizers/issue editors, offer some guiding thoughts to the collection and frame the accompanying voices via conversations of artmaking, activism, ritual, and care.