Roberto Alejandro, Political Science, UMass Amherst
with commentary by Justin Theodra, Political Science, UConn
February 20, 2023 from 12:15–1:30pm, Oak 438 and Zoom.
With generous support from the UConn Humanities Institute.
Questions? Email jane.gordon@uconn.edu
Dana Francisco Miranda, Philosophy, UMass Boston
with commentary by August Shipman, Political Science, UConn
December 5, 2022 from 12:15–1:30pm, Oak 438 and Zoom.
In the 1968 documentary drama, Tell Me Lies, the Pan-African organizer Kwame Ture states: “There is a difference between peace and liberation, is there not? You can have injustice and have peace. Isn’t that correct? You can have peace and be enslaved. So, peace isn’t the answer. Liberation is the answer.” Political orders free from disturbance or “at peace” have long served as the ideal. Yet, states can be functional, can even thrive, through the production of social interactions wherein some are subject to non-relations, or treated as nonbeings. The maintenance of non-relations often requires the subjection and violent subordination of such groups. Peace is maintained through disorder. Drawing on the works of Martin Luther King, Jr, Frantz Fanon, Roseann Liu, and Savannah Shange, this work interrogates how “peace” functions in conspiracy with domination and oppression and describes the solidarities necessary to combat and upend dysfunctional orders.
With generous support from the UConn Humanities Institute.
Questions? Email jane.gordon@uconn.edu
Erin Pineda, Government, Smith College
with commentary by Bianka Adamatti, Political Science, UConn
October 17, 2022 from 12:15–1:30pm, Oak 438 and Zoom.
“The whole world is watching.” Perhaps no phrase better encapsulates our hopes for what might be politically possible when the ordinary violence of police becomes an extraordinary public spectacle. But what is the shape of the world that is watching, and what is the political work performed by such a spectacle within it? This paper interrogates the spectacle of police violence against Black rebellion as an ambivalent multiplicity: a set of complex displays and encounters that solicit a variety of affective responses and inaugurate contradictory political possibilities. Fed through the logics of white supremacy, the scene of the “protest” is never fully free from the scene of the “riot”; the victims of the violence are also readily interpretable as aggressors; and the retaliatory and repressive violence of policing invites not just moral outrage but also rationalization, distancing, and eager identification with cruelty.
With generous support from the UConn Humanities Institute.
Questions? Email jane.gordon@uconn.edu
In 2022–23, the Political Theory Workshop will be hosting the following speakers. More information will be posted about each talk as it is available.
September 19th, 12:15-1:30p.m., Oak 438/Zoom
“The Coloniality of Happiness”
Dana Miranda, Philosophy, UMass Boston
Commentator: August Shipman, Political Science
October 17th, 12:15-1:30p.m., Oak 438/Zoom
“Seeing Like an Activist”
Erin Pineda, Government, Smith College
Commentator: Bianka Adamatti, Political Science
November 14th, 12:15-1:30p.m., Oak 438/Zoom
“Liberatory Intellectual Virtues and Education”
Heather Muraviov, Philosophy, UConn
Commentator: Brooks Kirchgassner, Political Science
January 30th, 12:15-1:30p.m., Oak 438/Zoom
“Theorizing Racial Caste with W.E.B. Du Bois”
Hari Ramesh, Government, Wesleyan University
Commentator: Altan Atamer, Political Science
February 20th, 12:15-1:30p.m., Oak 438/Zoom
“Political disorientation, legibility, and trumpism”
Roberto Alejandro, Political Science, UMass Amherst
Commentator: Justin Theodra, Political Science
March 27th, 12:15-1:30p.m. p.m., Oak 438/Zoom
“Caribbean Anticolonial Thought”
Aaron Kamugisha, Africana Studies, Smith College
Commentator: San Lee, Political Science
April 25th, 12:00-1:30p.m. Zoom (only)
“The Enlightenment-Era ‘Kindness Wars’ and the Political Theory of Jean-Jacques Rousseau”
Noel Cazenave, Sociology and Philosophy, UConn
Commentator: Michael Morrell, Political Science
Luis Beltrán-Álvarez, Political Science, UConn
with commentary by Dr. Gregory Doukas, Political Science, UConn
April 18, 2022 from 12:15–1:30pm, Oak 438 and Zoom
Luis J. Beltrán-Álvarez is from Aguadilla, Puerto Rico. He earned his bachelor’s degrees in Political Science and Sociology from the University of Puerto Rico Río Piedras and then earned a Master’s degree in Philosophy from the same institution. He is now a Ph.D. Candidate in Political Science in Political Theory and Comparative Politics at the University of Connecticut. His main research interests are political subjectivities, social movements, decolonial feminism, anticolonialism and decoloniality, anarchism, populism, philosophy of race/racism, and discourse theory.
With generous support from the UConn Humanities Institute, Africana Studies, Anthropology, El Instituto, OVPR, Philosophy, POLS, and Sociology.
Questions? Email jane.gordon@uconn.edu
Natasha Behl, Arizona State University
with commentary by San Lee, Political Science, UConn
March 21, 2022 from 12:15–1:30pm, Oak 408 and Zoom
India, the world’s largest democracy, has been experiencing a democratic decline. Since coming to power in 2014 and winning reelection in 2019, Prime Minister Narendra Modi and the Bharatiya Janata Party have become increasingly illiberal and authoritarian. The rule of law has deteriorated, rights and liberties have been curtailed, and scholars and the media have been silenced. If electoral constraint, constitutional design, judicial independence, and a free press haven’t slowed India’s march toward illiberalism, what can? In November 2020, India’s farmers began a highly organized protest against the government. How has this protest protected Indian democracy from further degradation? Has it radically altered India’s political future? The farmers’ protest provides an alternative vision of democracy, one rooted in radical egalitarianism. Protesting farmers have actualized the spirit of dissent enshrined in the Indian constitution by holding the current government accountable to it.
Natasha Behl is associate professor in the School of Social and Behavioral Sciences at Arizona State University (ASU). Her book, Gendered Citizenship: Understanding Gendered Violence in Democratic India, was published with Oxford University Press and received the American Political Science Association’s 2021 Lee Ann Fujii Award for Innovation in the Interpretive Study of Political Violence. Her research has been published in the American Political Science Review, PS: Political Science and Politics, Feminist Formations, and Politics, Groups, and Identities. At ASU, she was awarded the Outstanding Teaching Award, the Outstanding Faculty Mentor Award, ASU’s Excellence in Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Award and Social Impact Award. She has written for The Washington Post and Economic & Political Weekly and given a TEDx Talk
With generous support from the UConn Humanities Institute, Africana Studies, Anthropology, El Instituto, OVPR, Philosophy, POLS, and Sociology.
Questions? Email jane.gordon@uconn.edu
Anna Terwiel, Political Science, Trinity College
with commentary by Benjamin Stumpf, Political Science, UConn
February 25, 2022 April 1, 2022 from 12:15–1:30pm, Oak 408 and by Zoom
Many contemporary abolitionists argue that “carceral feminists” have contributed to mass incarceration by supporting criminal justice approaches to end sexual and gender violence. Instead of the criminal justice system, these “abolition feminists” advocate grassroots transformative justice initiatives that work outside of state institutions and the law. Community justice initiatives often showcase powerful assertions of feminist political agency, as Terweil shows through a close examination of Communities Against Rape and Abuse (CARA). However, she argues that abolition feminists’ anti-statism ultimately limits their ability to realize widespread radical change. She challenges this anti-statism by showing, first, that in other contexts, prominent abolitionists seek to seize state capacities and resources. Such efforts are important, Terweil suggests, not only to address the root causes of harm but also to counter right-wing militias and other forms of neoliberal and conservative anti-statism. She concludes by suggesting that some legal-institutional proposals of earlier European abolitionist scholar-activists, who oppose prisons and criminal law but see a role for the state in facilitating restorative justice processes, could productively inform US abolitionism.
Anna Terwiel is Assistant Professor of Political Science at Trinity College. Her research engages political theory, feminist theory, critical carceral studies, and medical humanities. She is currently completing a book project, The Challenge of Prison Abolition, which aims to clarify abolitionism’s goals and strengthen its outcomes by carefully engaging with its internal tensions and debates. Her articles have been published in Political Theory, New Political Science, Theory & Event, and Social Philosophy Today.
Benjamin Stumpf is a doctoral student in political theory at UConn.
With generous support from the UConn Humanities Institute.
Questions? Email jane.gordon@uconn.edu
Dabney Waring, Political Science, UConn
with commentary by Justin Theodra, Political Science, UConn
November 5, 2021 from 3:00-4:30p.m. EST, VIRTUAL
The structure-agency debate has long been central to social theory and remains a site of controversy. This paper makes two main interventions in this debate. First, expanding the critical realist approach to social ontology, it argues that group identities can be fruitfully theorized as structures – “collectivities” – that generate causal effects. Collectivities, as socio-symbolic structures, cut across and interact with states and societies, socio-material structures with their own causal effects. This formulation offers a richer account of global social space, displacing the domestic/international distinction that defines traditional statist frameworks of International Relations as well as many sociological and constructivist approaches. Second, it argues that, even with this expansion, there remains a theoretical void within social ontology, an intermediary gap between the natural/physiological and social structures that overdetermine individuals from “below” and “above.” Although it has long been rejected, ignored, or theoretically bracketed in a liberal conception of the subject, it argues that social theorists need a better account of the nexus that links natural and social structures, i.e., the psyche, and its general causal significance.
Dabney Waring is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Political Science at the University of Connecticut, Storrs. His research interests include IR theory, social and political theory, critical realism, and transcendental materialism.
With generous support from the UConn Humanities Institute.
Questions? Email jane.gordon@uconn.edu
Ainsley LeSure, Africana Studies,Brown University
with commentary by Gregory Doukas, Political Science, UConn
October 18th from 12:15-1:30p.m. EST, Oak 408
If the political, according to Afro-pessimists and other luminaries in black studies, has been, is currently, and likely will always be militated against black being, what would it take to recoup an account of the political that critically engages this literature’s conceptualization of humanity, blackness, the state, and civil society to recoup an account of the political that is not tethered to the project of antiblackness and white supremacy?
Ainsley LeSure is Assistant Professor of Africana Studies. Her current book project, tentatively titled, Locating Racism in the World: Toward an Anti-Racist Reality, reconceptualizes racism in the post-Civil Rights era by calling for a shift away from framing post-Civil Rights racism as either unconscious or institutional and toward a worldly account of racism that offers a better conception of the relationship between its individual and collective determinants.
With generous support from the UConn Humanities Institute.
Questions? Email jane.gordon@uconn.edu
Inés Valdez, Political Science and Latina/o Studies, Ohio State University,
with commentary by Taylor Tate, Philosophy, UConn
September 13th from 12:15-1:30p.m. EST on Zoom
The chapter brings together Marx’s and Luxemburg’s accounts of capital’s voraciousness for natural resources and exploitable labor with an ecological reading of W. E. B. Du Bois’s writings on empire. Valdez argues that that racism maps onto a nature/technology divide which positions technologically advanced societies as uniquely able to rule and dictate the fates of non-white peoples. This stance devalues nature and separates these societies from it and from the racialized subjects who labor the earth’s surface and its insides, whose products are appropriated by western collectives, depleting non-western ecosystems. The viability of such a structure depends on coerced or coopted political regimes of poor countries who detach themselves from their own needs to cater to western interests, i.e., a political rift that maps into the ecological rift created by global capitalism.
With generous support from the UConn Humanities Institute.
Questions? Email jane.gordon@uconn.edu
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