This CRITIQUE LECTURE will draw on Sara Rushing’s recent book, The Virtues of Vulnerability, to discuss how what she calls “citizen-subjectivity” can be produced within contexts of bodily vulnerability, particularly within mainstream healthcare in the United States, or within what Foucault called “the clinic.” Under relational and collaborative conditions defined […]

If you were lucky enough to live under just institutions, you would be morally unburdened in various ways. You could be confident that the legally valid entitlements you possessed, your opportunities and achievements, were rightfully yours. You could be confident that, insofar as others were less fortunate than you, this […]

In Jeanne Dielman (1975), From the Other Side (2002) and No Home Movie (2015), Belgian/French filmmaker Chantal Akerman’s camera does motherwork by creating spaces where characters and spectators encounter, hold, and work through discomforting feelings, events, and fantasies.  Informed by black feminist thinking on motherwork and fabulation, I explore how Akerman’s films acknowledge harmful fantasies and norms that structure the way we identify mothers, while also creating cinematic spaces where new practices of mothering and motherwork can be experienced and imagined.  Reading Akerman’s […]

Pre-read, virtual seminar with Alasia Nuti (York University). To receive the paper and link to the event, please email critique_centre@ed.ac.uk. Event co-sponsored with the Political Theory Research Group at the University of Edinburgh.

A CRITIQUE roundtable discussion on theories and practices of civil disobedience. Civil disobedience has always been the focus of a vibrant and contentious intellectual debate. The participants of this roundtable will address a series of interrelated questions: What are the political stakes in the definitional disagreements that inform contemporary work […]