Funded by the 2018 Collaborative Project Proposal Grant of the Academy of Global Humanities and Critical Theory, this workshop seeks to bring together faculty and graduate students who are working on ways to radically rethink the political in the face of a growing convergence between neoliberalism and neo-fascism. These two-day workshop will take place at Colorado College on October 25-26. Interested applicants should submit a CV and an abstract by July 15^th (11:59 EST) to the following e-mail address: subversivepoltheory@gmail.com With the following subject heading in the e-mail: “Subversive Theories of the Political Workshop.” Final decisions will be made on July 22^rd and all applicants will be notified shortly afterwards. All accepted faculty applicants will be supported with $200 in funds, in order to facilitate their travel and housing arrangements. All graduate students will be supported with $400 in funds for the same purposes. Accepted participants should confirm their attendance by August 6^th and make their own individual arrangements for airfare tickets and lodging. They should keep their receipts in order to be reimbursed. All participants are expected to discuss work-in-progress, and to identify two sessions in which they would like their contributions to be considered, taking into account the following two-day workshop sessions division:

Day 1:  Concepts

First Session: After hegemony and bio/necropolitics? Conceptualizing the political

We invite presentations that reinterpret already existing concepts of the political (i.e., hegemony, biopolitics, necropolitics, democracy, social death, settler colonialism, etc.), or develop new ones. 

            Second Session: After the demos? Conceptualizing political subjectivity

We invite presentations that reinterpret already existing concepts of political subjectivity (i.e., the demos, the slave, the native, the party, the social movement, the uncivil society, the undercommons, etc.), or develop new ones.

            Laura Padilla Lecture by Associate Professor Robyn Marasco, Hunter College

Day 2:  Problems

First Session: Rethinking the political

We invite presentations seeking to problematize our understandings of the emancipatory/liberatory energies and their coalitional modes of convergence/divergence, as well as the theoretical modes of inquiry that we have to interpret them.

Second Session: Rethinking political subjectivity

We invite presentations that unpack the implications, for our understanding of the political and of the intellectual traditions through which the political has been thought, of moving from difference understood as a question of social identity, to difference understood as a question of settler colonial positionality.

Third Session: Rethinking de-politicization

We invite presentations that reinterpret already existing concepts seeking to name neoliberal depoliticization (i.e., the police, coloniality, racial capitalism, etc.), or develop new ones.

The idea is to have two authors per session. This means that we will only accept a total of 10 submissions.