Friday 4 May 2018

How can we rethink the political implications of precarisation and indebtedness in envisioning and practicing alternative forms of living together? How might this rethinking work to performatively instate another possibility for the questions of Europe and “global South” in our times? In dealing with such questions, this panel argues for a perspective of critical embodied situatedness, conflicting institutionality, and alternative indebtedness. Hinging on radical epistemologies of feminist, queer, anti-racist, and postcolonial/decolonial studies, the papers propel a reflection on the question of what critical theory can do in these times of ongoing crisis. 

Athena Athanasiou is Professor of Social Anthropology and Gender Theory at Panteion University of Social and Political Sciences, Athens. Among her publications are the books: Agonistic Mourning: Political Dissidence and the Women in Black (Edinburgh University Press, 2017); Life at the Limit: Essays on Gender, Body and Biopolitics (Athens, 2007); Crisis as a ‘State of Exception’ (Athens, 2012); and (with Judith Butler) Dispossession: The Performative in the Political (Polity Press, 2013). She has been a fellow at the Center for the Study of Social Difference, at Columbia University. She is a member of the editorial advisory board of the journals Critical Times and Feminist Formations. 

Isabell Lorey is a political theorist at the European Institute for Progressive Cultural Policies (eipcp), based in Berlin, and member in the editorial board of the book series transversal texts. Currently she holds a professorship at the Institute for Political Science, University of Kassel. She taught political theory, social and cultural sciences, feminist and postcolonial theory as a professor at the Center for Gender Studies, University of Basel (2012-2015); at the Humboldt University Berlin (2010 and 2011) and the University of Vienna (2009 and 2010). 2001-2007 she held a C1-professorship for Gender & Postcolonial Studies at the University of the Arts Berlin, associated to the ‘Freie Klasse’ of Katharina Sieverding. In 2003 she was a founding member of the feminist and activist group ‘kleines postfordistisches Drama’ (kpD). Until 2000 she worked for several TV stations in Germany, mainly for the daily news-for-kids broadcast logo. International publications on: the precarization of labour and life in neoliberalism, social movements (a.o. Euromayday-movement and the democracy-movements since 2011), the critical theory of democracy and representation, and political immunization. In her habilitation (2009), published as Figuren des Immunen, she presents a new interpretation of the plebeian struggles in the Roman Republic as a starting point for a critical analysis of concepts of community and security, that she unfolds as different figures of the immune. Currently she is writing a book on “Presentist Democracy”.