Antigone working group

The Antigone Working Group was organized around three sequential activities:

  1. An Antigone Reading Group (Spring 2020), which focused on literary and theoretical criticism of the play.

  2. An Antigone Film Series (Fall 2020), a curated set of global films that took up the themes of political violence and contested burials in ways that resonate with the ancient tragedy.

  3. A colloquium, Antigone's Worldings, which brought together critical thinkers who have been instrumental in producing and thinking through questions relating to the reception, adaptation, and criticism of Sophocles’ ancient tragedy.

seminar: democratic practices in unequal geographies

Currently in its fifth year, this international and interdisciplinary seminar emerges out of an interest to put into conversation two bodies of literature: political philosophy and global south urbanism. By gathering a seminar we want to understand and problematize the meaning and practices of democracy by attending to their often-neglected contentious spatial materializations. Our effort is that of relating questions about the doing and undoing of the demos to the interrogation of its material spaces of appearance and disappearance.

This collective research project has been co-design with Professor Henrik Ernstson and Professor Ashley Bohrer. Below is the list of seminars that we have developed together and their location:

  1. Our first seminar took place in Cape Town, South Africa, during the week of July 27-31, 2015. This year we revisited the question of the demos (people) as subject, and explore the relationship of its power to the spaces of the city by analyzing philosophical texts devoted to Greek antiquity and contemporary literature on urgan geography in the global south.

  2. Our second seminar took place in Cape Town, South Africa, during the week of July 4-8, 2016. In this seminar we turned to the relationship between the political and the aesthetic, if grounded in urban contexts of the global south.

  3. Our third seminar took place in Cape Town, South Africa, during the week of June 19-23, 2017. In this seminar we focused on an intersectional analysis of capitalism and on the ways in which that analysis allowed us to understand changes in the democratic practices of subjects in global south urban contexts

  4. Our fourth seminar took place in Stockholm, Sweden, during the week of November 25-29, 2019. We continued to investigate the relationship of democratic practices to the contestation of capitalism, but this time we connected with the Crosscuts Film Festival to address films, as an specific democratic practice of contestation

  5. Our fifth seminar will take place in Stockholm, Sweden, during the week of June 25-28, 2024. This time we are turning to the relationship between capitalism and confinement, and to a reconsideration of democratic practices facing new technologies of captivity. 

SUBVERSIVE THEORIES OF THE POLITICAL

Funded by the 2018 Collaborative Project Proposal Grant of the Academy of Global Humanities and Critical Theory (University of Bologna), this workshop brought together faculty and graduate students who are working on ways to radically rethink the political in the face of a growing convergence between neoliberalism and neo-fascism.

The two-day workshop, organized with Professor Michael Sawyer, took place at Colorado College on October 25-26, 2018. This workshop included the Laura Padilla Lecture, delivered by Professor Robyn Marasco.

theatricality and the political

This seminar took place at the 2018 ACLA annual meeting, and asked: How might we newly theorize the relation, or non-relation, between theatricality and politics? The seminar invited scholars of political theory, theatre, performance, comparative literature, philosophy, aesthetics, and the intersections of these fields to make theoretical interventions that advanced our understanding of this pairing, and so questioned the familiar assumptions that have grown up around it.

This project, which emerged out of an ongoing collaboration with Professor Ryan Hatch and Professor Joseph Cermatory, since we met at the 2012 Mellon School of Theater and Performance in Harvard University, has evolved into a year long Reading Group on Karl Marx’ Grundrisse, and other projects.