Topics in Contemporary Critical Theory:

This seminar uses an open rubric of “topics in contemporary critical theory” to engage a wide range of current concepts, approaches, strands, and debates residing at the crux of social and cultural critique in the intersections of social and political theory, anthropology, literary and cultural studies. Located on these crossroads of the humanities and the social sciences, contemporary critical theory—in the broad sense used here—draws on several traditions of intellectual thought, including (post-)Marxism, ideology critique, critical ethnography, psychoanalytic theory, critical race theory, feminist and postcolonial/decolonial critique. The seminar traces such lines of inquiry in order to explore the links between knowledge, power, subjectivity, and the political. Special attention is given to the relationship between thought and praxis in various contemporary sociopolitical contexts.

Specific focus this time is the broader problem of democracy in contemporary societies, both in their national and their global dimensions. This is especially trenchant with the migration/refugee crisis in Europe, the problem of open/closed borders worldwide, and the security crisis in the aftermath of the pandemic and the war in Ukraine. The volume and intensity of human mobility from the Middle East and North Africa to Europe remains dramatically steady, despite the overall restrictions in mobility following the pandemic conditions worldwide and the resurgence of extreme nationalism. During the last decade refugee statelessness has evolved into a quasi-permanent liminal condition of being within the political body of ‘Western’ societies, especially in so called border countries of the European periphery. The continuous expansion and multiplication of internment camps in countries such as Turkey, Greece, Italy, Spain, etc. has created different states of existence within national territories, raising a wide range of issues that concern statehood, political rights, the right to equal treatment and access to public goods (i.e., health, education, safety, representation etc.).

This cascade of interior frontiers has precipitated a huge debate on questions of citizenship and democratic institutions in the broadest sense. Moreover, dissent has grown across societies, regardless of identity parameters (class, race, gender, ethnicity, religion) and across the ideological spectrum. What now seems to be a permanent crisis of democracy is paradoxically what reveals democracy’s