Lecture abstract: How do the contradictory demands of border walls and supply chains co-exist? These two political forces push in opposite directions. Claims to sovereignty try to establish territorial limits while globalization, by definition, is a boundary crossing enterprise. Yet, both are flourishing. Post-Brexit freeports and Trump’s border wall provide […]
Workshop Description When one walks into a room, one senses an atmosphere; political affinities and disagreements are expressed in more than words. The look and shape of things have long been understood as political. How can we extend research to include multi-sensory evidence? The stakes are high; the issues on […]
Lecture abstract: In his presidential address to a combined meeting of the American Historical Association and the American Political Science Association in 1909, James Bryce, then president of the AHA, reflected on the relationship between both. History provided the data for political scientists who then detected general patterns in the […]
Workshop Description In this workshop we explore with Prof Khoury questions related to historical methods as they appear in her own work. In particular: how to provincialize Europe? How to write histories outside and against the colonial archive? How to take serious forms of knowledge and narratives that fall outside […]
The police response to protests erupting on America’s streets in recent years has made the militarization of policing painfully transparent. Yet, properly demilitarizing the police requires a deeper understanding of its historical development, causes, and social logics. Policing Empires offers a postcolonial historical sociology of police militarization in Britain and the United […]
Workshop Description In recent years, critiques of Eurocentric social theory have proliferated. If is by now clear that conventional social theory is limited, tethered to an imperial standpoint and based upon the experiences of a small part of the world, how to overcome these limitations remains uncharted. How can the […]
Workshop Description In this session we discuss and learn to think of scholars as writers and to think of writing as a craft that must be practiced and perfected in community. The session will start by reading short pieces and discussing the writing experiences of participants, the question of accountability, […]
In this pre-red seminar, Prof Inés Valdez (John’s Hopkins) will discuss her paper ‘Dependent Capitalism and the Paradox of Democratic Founding’. Abstract: This paper presents a novel account of the paradox of postcolonial founding. Building upon Marxist dependency theorists Vania Bambirra, Ruy Mauro Marini, and Alvaro López, I diagnose a […]
Democracy and Empire: Labor, Nature, and the Reproduction of Capitalism (Cambridge UP) theorizes the material bases of popular sovereignty via the Black radical tradition. Popular sovereignty contains an affective attachment to wealth, secured through collective agreements to dominate others, that is, self-and-other-determination. Inés Valdez (Johns Hopkins) expands on racial capitalism by […]
Lecture abstract: This talk approaches the concept of autobiographical archives – which could encompass different genres of literary, ethnographic, and personal narratives – as a politics of reclamation among UK-based Iraqi Jews who were stripped of their citizenship in 1950-1951 and the so-called Iraqis of the Iranian origin who were […]
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