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 […]

Nicola Ramsey is the Head of Editorial at Edinburgh University Press, as well as the publisher for EUP’s highly-regarded Islamic & Middle Eastern Studies list. She has worked in the academic publishing industry for over 20 years, and is joining us to share ideas about getting a PhD thesis published […]

Virtual Author Meets Critics with Professor Danielle Celermajer, Sydney University Writing the unfolding climate catastrophe presents a dilemma for scholars. Our habitual modes have us writing ‘about’ the objects of our analysis. Academic conventions require that we offer a series of performative markers to render our analysis legitimate: citations, arguments, […]

Pre-read, virtual seminar with Robin Celikates (Free University, Berlin). 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.

The Politics and Ethics of Truth Commissions An International Forum on the Final Report by the Colombian Commission for the Clarification of Truth, Coexistence and Non-repetition   The analysis of truth commissions has gained philosophical attention in the last decades, especially after the unprecedented experiment of the South African Truth […]

A virtual CRITIQUE Lecture with Inder Marwah, McMaster University. Charles Darwin’s influence in political philosophy has, at best, a checkered past given its historical association with eugenics, various strands of social Darwinism, and race ‘sciences’ often marshalled to justify colonialism and imperialism.  And yet, Darwinian evolutionism’s conceptual utility in the […]

Pre-read, virtual seminar with Avia Pasternak (UCL). 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 roundtable discussion on Dan Degerman’s manuscript entitled  The Politics of Misery:Political Agency and the Medicalization of Negative Emotions. 
January 2021, via Zoom