Radical Democracy VI: What’s The Matter

May 5-6, 2017
The New School, NYC
6 East 16th St. (btwn Union Sq. West and Fifth Ave)

Conference Schedule

Friday, May 5

9:00: Breakfast + Welcome  (Wolff Conference Room, 1103)

10:00: Opening Remarks – faculty + student organizers (1103)

11:00: Panel 1 – Tactics, Affects, Disaffections (1103)

Shaila Bora (Philosophy - Georgia State University) - “Airports, Affect and Resistive Futures”

Filipe Campello (Philosophy - Federal University of Pernambuco, Recife-Brazil, + Politics - The New School for Social Research) - “Politics of passions: On the affective content of transnational public sphere”

Alexander Kolokotronis (Political Science – Yale University) - “The Exceptional Power of Labor: Groundwork to a Comparative Analysis of the United Federation of Teachers (UFT) & the Transit Workers Union (TWU Local 100)”

Merisa B. Sahin (Humanities and Social Thought – New York University) - “An Obligation to Democracy: Understanding Right-Wing Populisms via Nonsynchronism”

13:00: Lunch (Wolff Conference Room, 1103)

14:00: Panel 2 – Wobbly Inscriptions (1101)

Liz Scheer (Literary Studies - University of Wisconsin-Madison) - “Whitman’s Liberalism”

Richard Scheiwe (Philosophy - The New School for Social Research) - “Precarity & Indeterminacy: Randomness as the last hope for dissensual emergence and resistance”

Alena Wolflink (Politics – University of California Santa Cruz) - “Rancière, Value, and Democratic Agency”

Roundtable – Radical Democracy: An Unsettling (1103)

Jaskiran Dhillon (Assistant Professor, Global Studies and Anthropology – The New School)

Vienna Rye (Activist + Artist)

Tara Widner (Anishinaabe, Gaa-waabaabiganikaag - White Earth Reservation)

15:30: Tea + Coffee (Wolff Conference Room, 1103)

16:00: Panel 3 – South America: Communes, Popular Sovereignty + the Demos (1101)

Anderson Bean (George Mason University) - “Popular Power, Agency and Communes in Venezuela”

Gabriel Campos Soares da Fonseca (University of Brasilia Law School) - “Between the Classrooms and the Streets: A Project for a Radical Democracy and a Radical Constitution in Brazil”

Thea N. Riofrancos (Political Science - Providence College) - “The Demos in Dispute: Radical Democracy, Constituent Power, and Resource Extraction in Ecuador”

Roundtable – The Undercommons as the Antithesis to the Neoliberal University (1103)

Bianca Beauchemin (Gender Studies - UCLA)

Thabisile Griffin (History - UCLA)

OlúFÉmi O. Táíwò (Philosophy - UCLA)

Shondrea Thornton (Gender Studies - UCLA)

18:00: Keynote Address (Wolff Conference Room, 1103)

Dilip Gaonkar - “The Politics of Disorder and Radical Democracy”

 

Saturday, May 6

10:00: Breakfast (Wolff Conference Room, 1103)

11:00: Panel 4 – Post- 2011 Radical European Politics (1101)

Seamus Farrell (tbc)

Tatiana Llaguno (Politics – New School for Social Research) - “Hegemony, Populism and Feminism: The Case of Podemos”

Samuele Mazzolini (University of Essex) + Arthur Borriello (University of Cambridge) - “Southern European populisms as counter-hegemonic discourses? Podemos and M5S in comparative perspective”

Panel 5 – Wild Mattering, Critical Art (1103)

Lana Locke (Chelsea College of Arts, University of the Arts London) - “The Feral, the Social and the Art Object”

Pooja Sen (McGill University) - “Pixelated bodies: surveillance, resistance, and digital art”

Alexandra Tsay (George Washington University, Institute for European, Russian and Eurasian Studies, Central Asia Program) - “Street art as a public forum in postsocialist Kazakhstan”

13:00: Lunch (Wolff Conference Room, 1103)

14:00: Panel 6 – Imperialism in the 21st Century (1101)

Jason Hicks (Transport Workers Union Local 100) - “The Decline of Unions and Global Labor Arbitrage: The Case of the US South”

James LaMonte (Politics - The New School for Social Research) - "’The Factories Will Become the Graves of the Manufacturers’:  Turkish Workers, Yellow Unionism, and the Auto Industry in Bursa”

Erik John Van Deventer (NYU - Sociology) - “US Finance and Manufacturing in the Exploitation of Outsourcing”

 

Panel 7 – Border Crossings (1103)

Tyler Olsen (Political Theory – CUNY Graduate Center) - “Rancière, Liberal Democracy, and Play: Moving Beyond Immanent Critique”

Camille Pascal (Université Jean Moulin Lyon 3) - “On Naturalization: Citizenship Beyond Residence”

Mangalika de Silva (Rubicon Fellow, Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO) - “Bios Xenikos as Interlocutor: Of Jus Post Bellum”

16:00: Tea + Coffee (Wolff Conference Room, 1103)

16:30: Panel 8 – Staging Rights, Making Claims (1101)

Soheil Asefi (Politics – The New School for Social Research) - “Critique of Human Rights Discourses and Commodity Activism”

Rose Sheela (Center on National Security – Fordham University School of Law) - “Resisting Spectacle: Staging Effective Protest in the Theater of Trump”

Alexander Sieber (Human Rights Studies – Columbia University) - “Protecting Spiritual Rights in the Era of Empire”

Anarchism + Radical Democracy: A Roundtable Discussion with Crimethinc + Stathis Gougouris  (1103)

Clara (CrimethInc. Ex-Workers Collective)

Stathis Gourgouris (Professor - Classics, English, and Comparative Literature and Society – Columbia University)

18:00: Closing Plenary (Wolff Conference Room, 1103)

Yasmin Nair - “Is the University Dead?”

19:30: Reception  (Wolff Conference Room) All welcome

 

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About The Guest Speakers:

Dilip Gaonkar is Professor in Rhetoric and Public Culture and the Director of Center for Global Culture and Communication at Northwestern University. He is also the Director of Center for Transcultural Studies, an independent scholarly research network concerned with global issues. He was closely associated with the journal, Public Culture, serving as the Executive Editor (2000-2009) and as Editor (2009-2011). Gaonkar has two sets of scholarly interests: rhetoric as an intellectual tradition, both its ancient roots and its contemporary mutations; and, global modernities and their impact on the political. He has published numerous essays on rhetoric, including “The Idea of Rhetoric in the Rhetoric of Science” that was published along with ten critical responses to the essay in a book, Rhetorical Hermeneutics: Invention and Interpretation in the Age of Science, edited by Alan G. Gross and William Keith (1996). Gaonkar has edited a series books on global cultural politics: Globaizing American Studies (with Brian Edwards, 2010), Alternative Modernities (2001), and Disciplinarity and Dissent in Cultural Studies (1995). He has also edited several special issues of journals: Laclau’s On Populist Reason (with Robert Hariman, for Cultural Studies, 2012), Cultures of Democracy (for Public Culture, 2007), Commitments in a Post-Foundational World (with Keith Topper, 2005), Technologies of Public Persuasion (with Elizabeth Povinelli, 2003), and New Imaginaries (with Benjamin Lee, 2002). He is currently working on a book manuscript on Modernity, Democracy and the Politics of Disorder.

 

Yasmin Nair is a freelance writer, activist, and academic. The bastard child of queer theory and deconstruction, Nair has numerous critical essays, book reviews, investigative journalism, op-eds, and photography to her credit. She has appeared in a range of publications like Current Affairs, where she is an editor at large, The Baffler, Alternet, In These Times, Monthly Review, The Awl, The Chicago Reader, GLQ, The Progressive, make/shift, Time Out Chicago, The Bilerico Project, Windy City Times, Bitch, Maximum Rock’n’Roll, QED, and No More Potlucks. Her work has appeared in several anthologies, including False Choices: The Faux Feminism of Hillary Rodham Clinton. She lives in Chicago with her two cats, one of whom is technically dead.

Radical Democracy 6 is possible thanks to many people! In addition to speakers, panelists and discussants, We wish to SHOWER the following WITH GRATITUDE:

New School University Student Senate (USS)
Graduate Faculty Student Senate (GFSS-NSSR)
Vera List Center for Art + Politics
Dean’s Office of the New School for Social Research
Department of Politics
Politics Student Union (UPSS)
Professor Benjamin Lee (NSSR)
+ Politics Dept. Secretary Nancy Shealy - without whom we would be at sea