Event: "The Inevitability of Liberalism?"

On Friday, February 22, 2013, the Brown University Department of English will be sponsoring a symposium, "The Inevitability of Liberalism?" featuring Professors Amanda Anderson (Brown University), Catherine Gallagher (University of California Berkeley), Philip Gould (Brown University), and Deak Nabers (Brown University).  The description and schedule is as follows.

The Department of English presents "The Inevitability of Liberalism?"  Over the past half-century the fortunes of liberalism in critical thought have fluctuated wildly.  As the central ideological element of philosophical modernity, liberalism is the basis of political and aesthetic judgment, of investment in technological and scientific progress, and of all politics driven by hope, equality and belief in community.  This symposium will celebrate the recent arrival of Amanda Anderson on the Brown faculty by considering liberal thought as a darker concept, one alive to a negativity that runs through its brightest convictions.  What have been the effects of the dominance of liberal thinking in British and American studies?  How central to liberal thinking is the dialectic of hope and defeat?  How do theories of narrative, or the history of the novel more broadly, expand or complicate liberalism as a political form?  Is a non-complacent liberalism possible?  And is there any future for critical thinking beyond liberalism?

Friday, February 22, 2013
2:00-5:00 pm
Alumnae Hall, Crystal Room (194 Meeting Street)

2:00 pm: Welcome and Opening Remarks - Philip Gould (Department of English, Brown University)
2:15 pm: "Cold War Aesthetics: The Case of Trilling and Adorno" - Amanda Anderson (Department of English, Brown University)
2:45 pm: "When 'Liberal Democracy' Was an Oxymoron" - Catherine Gallagher (Department of English, University of California Berkeley)
3:15 to 3:30 pm: Break
3:30 pm: Response - Philip Gould (Department of English, Brown University)
3:50 pm: Response - Deak Nabers (Department of English, Brown University)
4:10 pm: Audience Q & A
5:00 pm: Reception

This event is organized by Professors Timothy Bewes and Jacques Khalip and is made possible by the Department of English and the Wetmore Fund for Literature.

Visiting Scholar: Jodi Dean, February 8, 2013

Please join us on Friday, February 8, 2013 for our next Mellon meeting!  We will be meeting at 12pm in the English Department (70 Brown Street), Room 315.  We will be hosting Professor Jodi Dodi, professor of political science at Hobart and William Smith Colleges in Geneva, NY.  She teaches broadly within modern and contemporary political theory, ranging from feminism to fascism, consumption, and citizenship. Her research interests include digital media; poststructuralism and psychoanalysis; neoliberalism and consumerism; cultural studies; and feminism theory. Dean's impressive list of publications boasts numerous journal articles, contributions to collected volumes, and seven monographs including Democracy and Other Neoliberal Fantasies: Communicative Capitalism and Left Politics (Duke UP, 2009),  Publicity’s Secret: How Technoculture Capitalizes on Democracy (Cornell UP, 2002), and her forthcoming work, The Communist Horizon (Verso, October 2012). Dean has edited and co-edited several collected volumes addressing questions of feminism, empire, and information networks. Dean also serves as co-editor of Theory and Event, an electronic academic journal published quarterly by John Hopkins University Press.   

Professor Dean will come and talk with the workshop about some of her previous work, as well as a forthcoming project that she will be workshopping with the group.  All readings will be available on the google site (log-in required).  Lunch will be provided.

We are also delighted to sponsor a public talk that evening.  Professor Dean will give a lecture entitled "Communicative capitalism: this is what democracy looks like" on Friday, February 8, 2013 at 4pm in Pembroke Hall, Room 305.  This lecture is also co-sponsored through the generous support of the Department of Political Science, the Department of Sociology, and the Graduate Student Council at Brown University.

Event: Chris Dixon, "Reinventing Radicalism"

Tomorrow, activist and scholar Chris Dixon will give a talk at Brown University about the convergence of social movements and grassroots organizing.

  

From the event facebook page:

"Reinventing Radicalism: Anti-Authoritarian Activism in North America" will discuss how the last decade has seen the exciting convergence of anti-authoritarian radicalism and broader-based movements in the U.S. and Canada. Coming out of this convergence, a growing cohort of activists are developing shared politics, practices, and sensibilities based in overlapping areas of work. This cohort is a political tendency, the anti-authoritarian current, which cuts across a range of left social movements. What distinguishes this current is its commitment to combining anti-authoritarian, anti-capitalist politics with grassroots organizing among ordinary, non-activist people. Drawing on in-depth interviews with organizers across North America, this presentation will trace the strands that have led into the anti-authoritarian current, explore the defining principles of its politics, and the discuss questions it poses for all of us committed to social transformation.

Chris Dixon is a scholar and longtime activist who received his PhD from the History of Consciousness program at the University of California at Santa Cruz. His writing has appeared in numerous book collections as well as periodicals such as Anarchist Studies, Left Turn, Social Movement Studies, and Upping the Anti. He is currently completing a book, tentatively titled Against and Beyond, based on interviews with anti-authoritarian organizers across the U.S. and Canada involved in broader-based movements.

This event will take place at 5:30 p.m. in Smith-Buonanno room 201. This lecture is the first in a series entitled "Global Resistance to Neoliberalism," and is sponsored by a Graduate International Colloquium grant from Brown University's Office of International Affairs. Those of you unable to attend can find a video of this talk hosted on vimeo.