Conference

The Department of Politics at The New School for Social Research embraces the occasion of the 6th Annual Radical Democracy Conference to ask: What’s the Matter? as a springboard into the material, practical, historical, lived, aesthetic, discursive and theoretical manifestations of Radical Democracy, and the constellation of claims with which it is associated. As preceding conferences have done, RD#6 will consider the theory and practice of radical democracy in its historical and contemporary settings.

This year’s theme is galvanized by an attention to the mattering happening all around us, and the ways these matters make radical claims upon the demos— popular sovereignty, demagoguery and tyranny, fascism and anti-fascism, racial justice, freedom struggles, declarations of defiance, resistance to oppression and colonial violence, and ongoing grassroots organizing; from Palestine to Ferguson, Syria to Delhi, Charlotte to DC, London to New York, Tepoztlán to Rojava, Oaxaca to Athens, Dhaka to Rio de Janeiro; people rise up in defense of water, land and democratic sovereignty; create migrant spaces of refuge, and enact critical multi-species with-standings around the world.

This event is co-sponsored by the Politics Department, NSSR, Vera List Center for Art and Politics, University Student Senate, NSSR Dean’s office, and Union of Politics Students, NSSR. It is curated by Eli Nadeau, VLC Fellow in Art and Social Justice, in collaboration with students from the NSSR Politics Department.

Conference Schedule

DAY 1
Friday, May 5

Opening Remarks (1103)
10:00 am  – 11:00 am
Deva Woodly: New School for Social Research Assistant Professor – Politics
Student Organizers, New School for Social Research – Politics

Panel 1 — Tactics, Affects, Disaffections (1103)
11:00 am – 1:00 pm
Chair: Sara Hassani: New School for Social Research – Politics Shaila Bora: Philosophy – Georgia State University
“Airports, Affect and Resistive Futures”
Filipe Campello: Philosophy – Federal University of Pernambuco, Recife-Brazil, + Politics – The New School for Social Research
“Politics of passions: On the affective content of transnational public sphere”
Alexander Kolokotronis: Political Science – Yale University
“The Exceptional Power of Labor: Groundwork to a Comparative Analysis of the United Federation of Teachers (UFT) & the Transit Workers Union (TWU Local 100)”
Merisa B. Sahin: Humanities and Social Thought – New York University
“An Obligation to Democracy: Understanding Right-Wing Populisms via Nonsynchronism”

Panel 2 — Wobbly Inscriptions (1101)
2:00pm – 4:00pm
Chair: Jan Smolenski: New School for Social Research – Politics
Liz Scheer: Literary Studies – University of Wisconsin-Madison
“Whitman’s Liberalism”
Richard Scheiwe Philosophy – The New School for Social Research
“Precarity & Indeterminacy: Randomness as the last hope for dissensual emergence and resistance”
Alena Wolflink Politics – University of California Santa Cruz
“Rancière, Value, and Democratic Agency”

Roundtable — Radical Democracy: An Unsettling (1103)
2:00 pm – 4:00 pm
Chair: Eli Nadeau: New School for Social Research – Politics
Two Clouds: Ramapough Lenape
Jaskiran Dhillon: Assistant Professor of Global Studies and Anthropology – The New School
Vienna Rye activist + artist
Tara Widner writer + ricer, Anishinaabe, Gaa-waabaabiganikaag – White Earth Reservation

Panel 3 — South America: Communes, Popular Sovereignty + The Demos (1101)
4:00 pm – 6:00 pm
Chair: Mayra Cotta Cardozo De Souza: New School for Social Research – Politics
Anderson Bean: George Mason University
“Popular Power, Agency and Communes in Venezuela”
Gabriel Campos Soares da Fonseca: University of Brasilia Law School
“Between the Classrooms and the Streets: A Project for a Radical Democracy and a Radical Constitution in Brazil”
Thea N. Riofrancos, Political Science – Providence College
“The Demos in Dispute: Radical Democracy, Constituent Power, and Resource Extraction in Ecuador”

Roundtable — The Undercommons as the Antithesis to the Neoliberal University (1103)
4:00 pm – 6:00 pm
Chair: Mia White: Assistant Professor of Environmental Studies – New Schools for Public Engagement
Bianca Beauchemin: Gender Studies – UCLA
Thabisile Griffin: History – UCLA
OlúFÉmi O. Táíwò: Philosophy – UCLA
Shondrea Thornton: Gender Studies – UCLA

This Roundtable was made possible by the Vera List Center for Art and Politics through the Art and Social Justice Fellowship program.

Keynote Address (1103)
6:00 pm – 8:00 pm
Dilip Gaonkar: Professor in Rhetoric and Public Culture and Director of the Center for Global Culture and Communication – Northwestern University
“The Politics of Disorder and Radical Democracy”

DAY 2
Saturday, May 6

Panel 4 — Post-2011 Radical European Politics (1101)
11:00 am – 1:00 pm
Chair: Katinka Wijsman: New School for Social Research – Politics
Seamus Farrell: Dublin City University
“Radical Media and Anti-Austerity Politics, the contrasting stories of Greece and Ireland”
Tatiana Llaguno: Politics – New School for Social Research
“Hegemony, Populism and Feminism: The Case of Podemos”
Samuele Mazzolini: University of Essex + Arthur Borriello: University of Cambridge
“Southern European populisms as counter-hegemonic discourses? Podemos and M5S in comparative perspective”

Panel 5 — Wild Mattering, Critical Art (1103)
11:00 am- 1:00 pm
Chair: Anke Gruendel: New School for Social Research – Politics
Lana Locke: Chelsea College of Arts, University of the Arts London
“The Feral, the Social and the Art Object”
Pooja Sen: McGill University
“Pixelated bodies: surveillance, resistance, and digital art”
Alexandra Tsay George Washington University, Institute for European, Russian and Eurasian Studies, Central Asia Program
“Street art as a public forum in postsocialist Kazakhstan”

Panel 6 — Imperialism in the 21st Century (1101)
2:00 pm – 4:00 pm
Chair: Elif Savas: New School for Social Research – Politics
Jason Hicks: Transport Workers Union Local 100
“The Decline of Unions and Global Labor Arbitrage: The Case of the US South”
Joe Lombardo: Politics – New School for Social Research
“‘The Factories Will Become the Graves of the Manufacturers’: Turkish Workers, Yellow Unionism, and the Auto Industry in Bursa”
Erik John Van Deventer: Sociology – New York University
“US Finance and Manufacturing in the Exploitation of Outsourcing”

Panel 7 — Border Crossings (1103)
2:00 pm – 4:00 pm
Chair: Erdinc Erdem: New School for Social Research – Politics
Tyler Olsen: Political Theory – CUNY Graduate Center
“Rancière, Liberal Democracy, and Play: Moving Beyond Immanent Critique”
Camille Pascal: Université Jean Moulin Lyon 3
“On Naturalization: Citizenship Beyond Residence”
Mangalika de Silva Rubicon Fellow, Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO)
“Bios Xenikos as Interlocutor: Of Jus Post Bellum”

Panel 8 — Staging Rights, Making Claims (1101)
4:30 pm – 6:00 pm
Chair: Mariia Shynkarenko: New School for Social Research – Politics
Soheil Asefi: Politics -New School for Social Research
“Critique of Human Rights Discourses and Commodity Activism”
Rose Sheela: Center on National Security – Fordham University School of Law
“Resisting Spectacle: Staging Effective Protest in the Theater of Trump”
Alexander SiebeHuman Rights Studies – Columbia University
“Protecting Spiritual Rights in the Era of Empire”

Anarchism and Radical Democracy: A Roundtable Discussion with Crimethinc + Stathis Gougouris (1103)
4:30 pm – 6:00 pm
Chairs: Louis Jargow + Noah Shuster: New School for Social Research – Politics
Clara: CrimethInc. Ex-Workers Collective
Stathis Gourgouris: Professor of Classics, English, and Comparative Literature and Society – Columbia University

Closing Plenary (1103)
6:00 pm – 8:00 pm
Yasmin Nair: freelance writer, activist, and academic
“Is the University Dead?”