Apr
26
Fri
Radical Democracy Conference: What Is Feminist Politics? @ New School, room tba
Apr 26 all-day

The Department of Politics at The New School for Social Research is sponsoring its 8th Annual graduate student conference on the concept, history, practices and implications of radical democracy.

This year, we invite abstracts and panel proposals that deal with the questions of feminist and radical democratic theory.

The last couple of years gave rise to new democratic movements. This new stage of grassroots democratic protests in countries such as US, Brazil, Argentina, Spain or Poland has been centered around feminist issues including sexual harassment, abortion law, domestic violence, and gender inequality. The Women’s March against Trump and International Women’s Strike present only two examples of the recent and global feminist wave. Why does the current wave of political mobilization in the US, Argentina, or Brazil have a feminist face? How does it differ from earlier democratic movements, including the movements of Occupy Wall Street and Black Lives Matter? What distinguishes this new wave from other feminist struggles from the past? Finally, what issues, reactions, and obstacles do contemporary feminists face in various places around the world? Our conference aims to address this set of questions.

We welcome papers that engage with the concept of feminism and its meaning, discuss the role of feminist and gender issues within the democratic tradition, as well as elaborate on the history of feminist politics. We particularly invite papers that propose a critical analysis of contemporary feminisms, elucidating their issues, dangers, and political potential.

Proposals should not be limited to this list, on the contrary, we encourage interdisciplinary papers and panels utilizing or critiquing the concepts of feminism and radical democracy from the point of view of post- anti- or de-colonialism, queer theory, indigenous studies, disability studies, or critical race theory

Please submit your paper or panel abstracts by March 8, 2019, to radicaldemocracy@newschool.edu.
http://www.radicaldemocracy.org/
https://philevents.org/event/show/70334

Sep
26
Thu
How To Be An Anti-Capitalist in the 21st Century: A Conference in Memory of Erik Olin Wright @ Wolff Conference Room
Sep 26 all-day

ERIK OLIN WRIGHT spent the last years of his life thinking about ways to challenge and transform capitalist societies. He distilled his thinking in a book, How to Be an Anti-Capitalist in the 21st Century (Verso, 2019). The symposium is designed to launch a debate about the strengths and weaknesses of Wright’s approach. We seek to both honor our colleague’s memory and assure that his ideas become part of current discussions of socialism and socialist strategy. The event will consist of three panels during the day and an evening session that will include tributes to Wright and a keynote by his friend, Ira Katznelson.

For full program and to RSVP please visit capitalismstudies.org/anti-capitalist/
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Schedule
9:00 – 9:30 am | Welomc
William Milberg, The New School for Social Research
Magali Sarfatti-Larson, Temple University
9:30 – 11:30 am | Session 1: Conceptualizing Capitalism
Vivek Chibber, NYU
Stephanie Mudge, University of California, Davis
Michael Dawson, University of Chicago
Discussant: Gianpaolo Baiocchi, NYU
1:00 – 2:45 pm | Session 2: Oppositional discourses and strategies
Stephanie Luce, City University of New York
Glen Coulthard, University of British Columbia
Teresa Ghilarducci, The New School for Social Research
Discussant: Angela Harris, University of California, Davis
3:15 – 5:00 pm | Session 3: Socialism, Human Rights, and Sites of Contestation
Nancy Fraser, The New School for Social Research
Cesar Rodriguez-Garavito, University of los Andes
Sabeel Rahman, Brooklyn Law School
Discussant: TBA
7:00 – 8:00 pm | Remarks on E.O. Wright’s Legacy
Friends and colleagues of Erik Olin Wright will deliver
remarks on his legacy.
8:00 – 9:30 pm Keynote
Ira Katznelson, Columbia University

 

This event is co-sponsored by the Robert L. Heilbroner Center for Capitalism Studies at The New School for Social Research, and the journal, Politics & Society.

 

Oct
24
Thu
Film screening & discussion “Toxic Reigns of Resentment” @ Klein Conference Room, Room A510
Oct 24 @ 6:00 pm – 8:00 pm

Sjoerd van Tuinen and Jürgen Schaflechner will present their film “Toxic Reigns of Resentment” featuring Wendy Brown, Grayson Hunt, Rahel Jaeggi, Alexander Nehamas, Robert Pfaller, Gyan Prakash, Peter Sloterdijk, and Sjoerd van Tuinen. NSSR philosopher Jay Bernstein will respond after the screening.

After the fall of the Soviet empire and the triumph of global capitalism, modernity appeared to keep its dual promise of liberty and equality. The spreading of human rights and democratic forms of government were intrinsically linked to free flows of global capital and free markets. Supported by technological developments and an ever-increasing digitalization of daily life, the future contained the promise of abundance and recognition for all.

Only a few decades later, however, we witness an oppositional trend: A revival of nationalism paired with xenophobia, an increasing tribalization of politics, a public sphere oscillating between cruelty and sentimentality, and a Left caught up in wounded attachments. Social media, once the promise to give voice to the disempowered, link cognitive capitalism with a culture of trolling and hyper moralization. Algorithms programmed to monetarize outrage feed isolated information bubbles and produce what many call the era of post-truth politics.

How did we enter this toxic climate? Are these developments a response to the ubiquity of neoliberal market structures eroding the basic solidarities in our society? Has the spread of social media limited our ability to soberly deal with conflicting life worlds? And have both the left and the right given in to a form of politics where moralization and cynical mockery outdo collective visions of the future?

Feb
4
Tue
Castoriadis and the Permutations of the Social Imaginary. Suzi Adams @ Wolff Conference Room, D1103
Feb 4 @ 4:00 pm – 6:00 pm

This paper considers Cornelius Castoriadis’s articulation of social imaginary significations with an emphasis on their link to the radical imaginary. Castoriadis wrote on social imaginary significations for more than thirty years, and his understanding of them changed significantly during this time, yet this is not reflected in debates on his work. The paper argues that there are three distinct phases in his reflections. The first phase can be dated 1964-1970. This early phase is characterized by Castoriadis’s break from Marx and subsequent settling of accounts with Marxism. Central to Castoriadis’s critique of Marx was the recognition of history (or: the social-historical) as the domain of meaning and unmotivated creation as the work of the radical imaginary. Importantly, Castoriadis also considered the intertwining of the imaginary with the symbolic, on the one hand, and with social doing, on the other. Castoriadis’s approach in this early phase can be considered phenomenological in the broad sense that Merleau-Ponty gave it in the Phenomenology of Perception. The second phase is dated 1970-1975; that is, the period in which Castoriadis wrote the second part of The Imaginary Institution of Society wherein he announced his turn to ontology. This is his most self-contained and systematic articulation of social imaginary significations. Castoriadis extends and develops his notion of magma in relation to social imaginary significations and emphasizes the social imaginary creation of a world ex nihilo as an ontological creation, whilst the radical imaginary is presented as a part of his emergent general ontology of à-être. The third ‘kaleidoscopic’ phase is dated 1976-1997 and may be understood as a period of consolidation and expansion. Although his basic understanding of social imaginary significations did not dramatically alter (although further developments are visible), his thought went in a myriad of different directions and patterns – hence kaleidoscopic — that nonetheless shaped a wider background against which his elucidation of social imaginaries were configured. His reconsideration of the sacred, the ‘ground power’ of institutions, and the development of a poly-regional ontology of the for-itself were key to this changing background. The paper will conclude with a critical engagement with the implications of the changing permutations of the imaginary element for Castoriadis’s thought.

Dr. Suzi Adams is Senior Lecturer in the College of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences at Flinders University and permanent External Fellow at the East-Central European Institute for Philosophy, Charles University (Prague). She is a founding co-ordinating editor of the Social Imaginaries refereed journal and book series, and from October-December 2019, was an inaugural Senior Research Fellow at the Humanities Centre for Sustainable Futures at the University of Hamburg. She has published widely in the social imaginaries field, including most recently Social Imaginaries: Critical Interventions (Eds. Suzi Adams and Jeremy Smith), 2019, Rowman and Littlefield International, London. She is currently writing a monograph entitled Castoriadis and the Imaginary Element (forthcoming with Rowman and Littlefield International).

Mar
6
Fri
1st Graduate Conference in Political Theory @ Politics Dept. New School
Mar 6 – Mar 7 all-day

The Politics department at the New School for Social Research will host its 1st Graduate Conference in Political Theory on March 6-7th, 2020.

We are launching this event to provide graduate students in the history of political thought, political theory and political philosophy an opportunity to present and receive feedback on their work. A total of six (6) papers will be accepted and each of them will receive substantial comments from a New School graduate student, to be followed by a general discussion. We welcome submissions from all traditions, but we are particularly interested in providing a venue for those students working on critical approaches. We would also like to encourage applications from under-represented groups in the field.

We are delighted to announce that Professor Robyn Marasco (Hunter College, City University of New York) will deliver the inaugural keynote address.

Submissions for the conference are due by December 10th, 2019. Papers should not exceed 8,000 words (excluding footnotes and bibliography) and should be sent in PDF format with the help of the electronic form provided below. Papers should be formatted for blind review with no identifying information. Abstracts will not be accepted. A Google account is needed in order to sign-in to the submission form; if you don’t have one, please email us. Papers will be reviewed over the winter break and notifications will be sent out early January 2020.

For any questions, please contact NSSRconferencepoliticaltheory@gmail.com
https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSfqJWRPS5DBI-zlmS4-3m-FpZA3suckmInHSIlvayKoibzQYg/viewform

https://philevents.org/event/show/77746

Apr
10
Fri
9th Annual Radical Democracy Conference “Radical Ecologies” @ Department of Politics, The New School for Social Research
Apr 10 – Apr 11 all-day

The 9th annual Radical Democracy conference, sponsored by the Department of Politics at The New School for Social Research, will convene theorists and practitioners around the theme of Radical Ecologies. In the year that “climate strike” was named word of the year by Collins Dictionary, we seek to explore what opportunities for democratic resistance can be found in a multiplicity of ecologies. The conference will provide a platform for dialogue on the urgent question of our future in a post-climate change world.

Against the backdrop of increasingly visible and devastating climate disasters, resurgent environmental movements are embracing divergent visions and methods of struggle to realize change. As such, it is timely to ask, What makes an ecology radical? A multitude of intersecting traditions have sought to answer this question. An eco-feminist might approach this through the lens of social reproduction. An eco-socialist might frame radical ecology in terms of a mode of production beyond capitalism that can sustain and replenish nature. Indigenous perspectives can draw on centuries of resistance to extractive colonial capitalism. The conference will consider how a radical ecological praxis can be pursued within this plurality of histories, cosmologies and schools of thought, and, crucially, examine what we can learn from the work of activists on the frontline. We therefore call on both scholars and activists to engage in a fruitful dialogue on the still unsettled relationship between politics and the environment.

We seek abstracts and panel proposals that grapple with this issue across a broad range of perspectives and disciplines, including, but by no means limited to:

  • environmental social movements past, present and future;
  • indigenous, subaltern, decolonial and posthuman perspectives and strategies of resistance;
  • the urgency of converging ecological crises, and strategic possibilities and limitations of confronting it within existing political systems;
  • the theoretical and ontological underpinnings of environmentalism in the global North, and critiques thereof;
  • networks of alliance across geographical space, disciplinary boundaries, and patterns and institutions of oppression;
  • materialist analyses of winners and losers in the clean energy transition and ecological sustainability movement;
  • questions of future(s) and intergenerational ethics;
  • meditations on the relations between aesthetics, activism, and the nonhuman.

The conference will take place over two days, the structure of which will include graduate-student panels, an indigenous activist-scholar roundtable, and a keynote address.

For individual paper proposals, please submit a one-page abstract (max. 300 words) that includes institutional affiliation, academic level and contact information. Complete panel proposals with up to four papers are strongly encouraged.

Please submit your paper or panel abstracts by February 1st, 2020, to radicaldemocracy@newschool.edu. Selected participants will be notified March 1st, 2020. Full conference papers are due by April 5, 2020.

https://philevents.org/event/show/78134

Apr
23
Thu
Animalhouse: Animals and Their Environs. @ Philosophy Dept., New School
Apr 23 – Apr 24 all-day

NEW SCHOOL FOR SOCIAL RESEARCH PHILOSOPHY GRADUATE CONFERENCE

Keynote Speakers: Cary Wolfe (Rice) and Lori Gruen (Wesleyan)

This conference seeks to explore the relationship between animals and their environs, as well as the philosophical traditions that speak to these complex notions. We invite participants to question if and how philosophy’s treatment of animals and their environs can help us make sense of our current ecological situation. How have considerations of habitat, dominion, and domesticity determined the (ethical, ontological, rhetorical) status of animals? Conversely, how have presuppositions about “the animal” informed what environs are proper to “man”? What would it mean for an animal to be “at home” in the current world? Can philosophical approaches to animals be more than an instrumentalizing procedure? How will climate change alter not only the vitality of a species but the very grounds from which it lays claim to a home?

We welcome paper submissions of no more than 2500 words, that are prepared for a blind review, and suitable for a 15-20 minute long presentation.

Email your submission (in PDF format) to tns.animalhouse@gmail.com with “Animalhouse Submission” in the subject line. In your email, please include the following details: (a) author’s name; (b) paper title; (c) institutional affiliation; (d) contact information; and (e) abstract of no more than 250 words. Please do not include your name on the paper you are submitting. The deadline for submissions is December 31, 2019. Accepted speakers will be notified by February 1, 2020.

Questions can be directed to Aaron Neber at tns.animalhouse@gmail.com.

For updated program information and full CFP, see: https://animalhouse2020.weebly.com/

https://philevents.org/event/show/77650

Oct
14
Fri
A LIFE IN THOUGHT: A SERIES OF CONVERSATIONS IN CELEBRATION OF THE LIFE AND WORK OF RICHARD J. BERNSTEIN @ Starr Foundation Hall
Oct 14 all-day

 9:30am EST OPENING REMARKS

Scott Shushan, Visiting Assistant Professor of Philosophy, Sarah Lawrence College

Dr. Renée T. White, Provost and Professor of Sociology, The New School

Alice Crary, University Distinguished Professor of Philosophy, The New School for Social Research

9:45-11:15 PHILOSOPHY AS PEDAGOGY

Karen Ng (moderator), Associate Professor of Philosophy, Vanderbilt University
Roy Ben-Shai, Assistant Professor of Philosophy, Sarah Lawrence College
Megan Craig, Associate Professor of Philosophy, Stony Brook University
Judith Friedlander, Professor Emerita of Anthropology, Hunter College, and former Dean of The New School for Social Research

11:30-1:00 PHILOSOPHY AND THE PUBLIC GOOD

Simona Forti (moderator), Professor of Political Philosophy, Scuola Normale Superiore, Pisa, Italy
Axel Honneth, Jack C. Weinstein Professor for the Humanities, Columbia University
Philip Kitcher, John Dewey Professor Emeritus of Philosophy, Columbia University
Joel Whitebook, Professor, Columbia University Center for Psychoanalytic Training and Research

1:00–2:00pm Lunch Break

2:00 REFLECTION

Cinzia Arruzza, Associate Professor of Philosophy, The New School for Social Research

2:10-3:50 PHILOSOPHY IN A PLURALIST SPIRIT

David Clinton Wills (moderator), Professor, New York University-Gallatin
María Pía Lara, Professor and Researcher, Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana
Chiara Bottici, Associate Professor of Philosophy and Director of Gender and Sexuality Studies,The New School for Social Research
Lucius Outlaw, Jr., W. Alton Jones Professor of Philosophy, Vanderbilt University
Charles Taylor, Professor Emeritus of Philosophy, McGill University

4:05-5:35 DEMOCRACY AS A TASK BEFORE US

Dmitri Nikulin (moderator), Professor of Philosophy, The New School for Social Research
Seyla Benhabib, Eugene Meyer Professor of Philosophy and Political Science. Emerita, Yale University and Senior Research Fellow, Columbia Law School and Columbia Center for Contemporary Critical Theory
Rainer Forst, Professor of Political Theory and Philosophy, Goethe University Frankfurt am Main
Nancy Fraser, Henry A. and Louise Loeb Professor of Political and Social Science, The New School for Social Research

Organized by Marcia Morgan and Scott Shushan in collaboration with the Department of Philosophy at The New School for Social Research. 

Nov
10
Thu
Philosophy Colloquium Book panel: Anat Matar “The Poverty of Ethics” @ Wolff Conference Room/D1103
Nov 10 @ 6:00 pm – 8:00 pm

Book panel:  Anat Matar, The Poverty of Ethics  (Verso books 2022)

Participants:

Anat Matar (Senior Lecturer of Philosophy at Tel Aviv University)

Simon Critchley (Hans Jonas Professor of Philosophy at NSSR)

Raef Zreik (Visiting Fellow at Yale Law School, and Associate Professor of Jurisprudence at Ono Academic College)

 

Abstract:

It is a common assumption that ethics must serve as the cornerstone of politics. Yet abstract moral arguments have always been used for justifying all kinds of atrocities; ethical sensitivity and compassion have been expressed towards particular kinds of victims, while totally ignoring others.

The liberal West, in particular, continually manifests such blindness. It is horrified by non-Western oppressive methods, but turns a blind eye to their Western equivalents.

The gratification of holding the moral high ground consistently serves as a political instrument in the hands of those seeking to shore up the existing order.

In The Poverty of Ethics, philosopher and activist Anat Matar argues for the conceptual primacy of political discourse over ethics and claims that only the political force which stands for equality, justice and democracy – the Left – can provide the coordinates for an ethical life under conditions of global injustice.

Appealing to philosophical ideas on the essence of language, Matar shows how the ethos of the Left, as it has evolved over years, underlies and gradually forms the basis for ethics.

Struggles against slavery, racism, colonization and militarization, protests against exploitation and the capitalist order, the feminist movement, global demands for climate action – all these are primarily motivated by a deep understanding of Left heritage rather than by abstract ethical requirements or by airy sensitivities. They, in turn, shape and reshape our notion of moralit

Mar
9
Thu
Rethinking Critique: Dialectic of Enlightenment and Models of Cultural Evolution. Benjamin Morgan @ Wolff Conference Room/D1103
Mar 9 @ 6:00 pm – 8:00 pm

In 1931, Max Horkheimer proposed a model of interdisciplinary research that remains a benchmark for understanding how cultures function and might function better. He imagined an institute “in which philosophers, sociologists, economists, historians, and psychologists are brought together in permanent collaboration” (Horkheimer 1993, 9). The institute would not work with a single theory but would let data lead to new hypotheses (Horkheimer 1993, 10). But the work of Horkheimer and colleagues rarely lived up to the 1931 vision of an interdisciplinary, empirically grounded approach to culture. To understand why, my paper will juxtapose Horkheimer’s and Adorno’s history of humanity, as it is set out in Dialectic of Enlightenment, with current research on the development of early human cultures by Richard Wrangham, Sarah Blaffer Hardy, Kim Sterelny, Joseph Henrich and Cecilia Heyes. The comparison with recent research in anthropology, sociology, philosophy, and cognitive science reveals some of the deep conceptual commitments that limit Horkheimer’s and Adorno’s focus on instrumental reason and conceptual violence. By contrast, current approaches jointly suggest that human subjectivity is scaffolded and embedded; that cooperation is the necessary default for cultural transmission; that learning occurs in context through imitation; and that customs and institutions develop contingently and by accident through processes of cooperation and collaboration. These new insights invite a radical re-thinking of the phenomena Horkheimer and Adorno grouped together as ‘mimesis.’ The resulting picture of environmentally embedded process of cultural evolution is a first step towards revitalizing the interdisciplinary potential of the early Frankfurt School, and suggesting new, practical, productive, and sustainable routes such critique can take in the 21st century.

 

 

Bio:

 

Benjamin Morgan is Professor of German and Comparative Literature at the University of Oxford, and a Fellow of Worcester College. In 2019, and 2020/21 he was also Visiting Associate Professor of German at Harvard University. He is author of On Becoming God: Late Medieval Mysticism and the Modern Western Self (Fordham UP, 2013), and numerous articles on modernist literature, film, and philosophy. He edited, with Carolin Duttlinger and Anthony Phelan, Walter Benjamins Anthropologisches Denken (Rombach, 2012), and with Sowon Park and Ellen Spolsky a Special Issue of Poetics Today on “Situated Cognition and the Study of Culture” (2017).