Robert Gooding Williams
Professor, Columbia University
Propaganda, Beauty, and the Moral Psychology of White Supremacy: On the Political Aesthetics of W.E.B. Du Bois
Date and Time:
Friday, October 26, 2018 2:00 PM to 3:30 PM
Linda Zerilli
Professor, University of Chicago
Rethinking Critique as a Political Practice of Freedom with Arendt and Foucault
Date and Time:
Friday, October 5, 2018 2:00 PM to 3:30 PM
Andrew Gates
PhD Candidate, University of Virginia
Idle No More and the Settler-Colonial State
Date and Time:
Tuesday, November 17, 2020 1:00 PM
Lawrie Balfour
Professor, University of Virginia
Toni Morrison and the Liberatory Work of Words
Date and Time:
Friday, February 15, 2019 2:00 PM to 3:30 PM
Daniel Henry
PhD. Candidate, University of Virginia
Disruptive Sounds of the Present-Past: "The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man"
Date and Time:
Friday, March 8, 2019 2:00 PM to 3:30 PM
Sharon Sliwinski
University of Western Ontario
Of Refuge and Reverie
Date and Time:
Friday, March 22, 2019 2:00 PM to 3:30 PM
Abstract/Description:
We all have seen the pictures: drowned children washed up on the beach, overcrowded rubber boats engulfed by the Mediterranean sea, throngs of displaced people gathered at border gates. The global migrant “crisis” has opened an unprecedented political quandary that has captured the attention of politicians, policy makers, and the public. It has also opened critical questions about our image-making practices. My discussion will interrogate the visual politics surrounding the recent iteration of this “crisis.” I will also present an excerpt of The Reverie Project (co-created with Martina Bacigalupo), a series of video portraits that provide an intimate encounter with a migrant community in Geneva. Inspired by Édouard Glissant’s notion of the right to opacity, the project aims to cultivate a sense of privacy (refuge) and highlight the political importance of the life of the mind (reverie).
Claire McKinney
Assistant Professor, College William & Mary
Conceiving Medicalized Citizenship: Abortion Politics and Gendered Political Belonging
Date and Time:
Friday, April 5, 2019 2:00 PM to 3:30 PM
Abstract/Description:
Why do abortion politics matter? Feminists have long argued that in addition to the importance of the denial of access to a necessary service, abortion politics mark the continued investment in the control of women’s bodies and the construction of womanhood as equivalent to motherhood. Without contesting this feminist insight, this paper argues that abortion politics can also turn our attention to a particular valence of the control of women’s bodies formed through the practice and knowledge production of medicine. Through an analysis of the 19th century criminalization of abortion, I posit the importance of understanding women’s partial political belonging as a form of what Etienne Balibar calls “internal exclusion,” conditioned on the ways in which women’s bodies become vehicles for establishing particular forms of political and social authority. Understanding women’s citizenship as a medicalized citizenship reveals the ways that extra-political social interaction produces horizons of meaning for contemporary abortion politics that remain centrally tied to questions of health as well as a diagnosis for the continued resistance to women’s full political belonging in the United States.
Dan Luban
Junior Research Fellow, University College, Oxford
What Is Spontaneous Order?
Date and Time:
Friday, April 12, 2019 2:00 PM to 3:30 PM
Abstract/Description:
Due especially to the work of Friedrich Hayek, “spontaneous order” has become an influential concept in social theory. It seeks to explain how human practices and institutions emerge as unintended consequences of myriad individual actions, and points to the limits of rationalism and conscious design in social life. The political implications of spontaneous order theory explain both the enthusiasm and the skepticism is has generated, but its basic mechanisms remain elusive and under-examined. This paper teases out the internal logic of the concept, arguing that it can be taken to mean several distinct things. Some are forward-looking (defining it in terms of present-day functioning) while others are backward-looking (defining it in terms of historical origins). Yet none of these possibilities prove fully coherent or satisfactory, suggesting that spontaneous order cannot bear the analytical weight that has been placed upon it.
Academic Year: