Conferences

Center of Contemporary Culture of Barcelona Are we to conclude that the collective enthusiasm and radical hope associated with Tahrir Square, Gezi Park, Hong Kong Central, Zuccotti Park, the Puerta del Sol, and other sites of public demonstrations of the left were simply fleeting moments which now give way to an authoritarian backlash and repression coupled with reactionary populism? The criminalization of dissent is not new. And yet, the recent rise to power of right-wing populist movements and the fraternal consolidation among authoritarian leaders poses new challenges to movements for democratization and political self-determination, including the resistance to occupation, disenfranchisement, …

In 2050, will today’s Anglophone universities exist in their basic current form? Many experts say no, wagering that most will be absorbed into commercial learning platforms. Would that be a bad thing? Many critics say that would not necessarily be the worst outcome. They argue that the Anglophone university is culturally inappropriate for most of the world, has lost the democratizing impulses it may once have had, and is now primarily an engine of inequality that supports the reproduction of elites. This conference will convene scholars from around the world to develop a theoretical framework for identifying a full range …

Centro Cultural de la Memoria Haroldo Conti In this international conference we propose to address the problem of memory from a critical perspective across different geopolitical contexts: post-dictatorial, post-colonial, post-war and civil conflict, and with respect to ongoing forms of discrimination and state violence. How, we ask, do differing contexts set the stage for various political formulations of memory? We take as our point of departure the articulation among truth, justice, and human rights as it bears upon a politics of the state and responds to the insistent demand to provide an ethical safeguard against the erasure of the violent …

Hosted jointly by the Centre for Applied Philosophy, Politics and Ethics (CAPPE) at the University of Brighton, and the Department of Politics at Boğaziçi University, Istanbul, in collaboration with the University of California, Berkeley, this conference brings together global reflections on critical responses to the fascisms and populisms of our time. This conference takes place at an unprecedented time. The early years of the 21st century have seen the reemergence of fascisms; the naturalization of nationalist, populist, sexist, xenophobic and provocative hate speech and conduct; and the marginalization of local and global progressive politics. Many events suggest a return to the …

This workshop seeks to prompt anew the question on the dialectic of art and criticism from the standpoint of social and political exigencies of our times. It attempts to address the transformative capacity of contemporary art and art criticism to inscribe in and actively condition or mobilize collective imaginaries and struggles contesting domination. The “contemporary” here does not only refer to contemporary artistic forms and productions but, more widely, to art that, in its afterlives and futurity, is signified and contextualized as contemporary. We would like to explore art as a mode of political performativity and embodied critical engagement with …

The critique of violence is the focus of the fourth meeting of the conference cycle of the International Consortium of Critical Theory Programs. A small group of scholars will meet in Rijeka, Croatia with faculty and students from the Balkans to discuss Walter Benjamin’s essay “A Critique of Violence,” combining a close reading of the text with a discussion of the broader question, “what is the critique of violence now?” Topics include legal violence, the ghostly presence of police, the general strike, the biblical and Marxist dimensions of the text, the philosophy of history, critique, anarchism, life, and various forms …

This conference brings together global reflections on critical memory developed over the last twenty-five years. Historical events such as slavery, colonial conquest, occupation, partition, war, apartheid and dictatorship—as well as democratic transitions, reparations of past injustice, the outlawing of discriminatory practices, and turning points in post-human modes of understanding, both ecological and technological—will provide points of departure  for thinking about the role of critique in our understanding of political time. We will investigate connections between histories that persist into the present and we will also reflect on the implications of such entanglements and aftermaths. Do histories end when they are …

This conference is the first meeting of the conference cycle of the International Consortium of Critical Theory Programs (ICCTP), funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.  Focused on “The Critical Tasks of the University,” the conference will evaluate the prevailing metrics of value that increasingly structure and restrict the university in various global locations and consider how critical thought or more robust notions of “critique” can inform and enliven our contemporary reflections on valuable ways of knowing. As important as it is to support the study of critical theory in the university, it is also crucial to defend the university …

The rise of many populist movements in recent years is a phenomenon that leads us to pose structural questions about the challenges for liberal democracy and its institutional forms. We can ask whether liberal democracy, this practice of government that emerges after World War II, is facing today the imminence of its historical demise, the result of widespread resentment produced by non-realized social demands. Or we can also ask whether populism is just a temporary social regression that should be treated as a kind of political pathology proper to moments of crisis in capitalism. Finally, we can ask whether populism …