Re-visioning Politics: Theorizing Liberation in Crisis
Saturday April 12th and Sunday April 13th, 2025
In Spring 2025, the department of Political Science at the University of Chicago will host its third bi-annual Graduate Conference in Political Theory. This conference will bring together graduate students from around the country and world to take stock of our discipline in light of the most urgent crises of our time: climate catastrophe, the international rise of neo-fascism and ethnonationalism, patterns of colonial and neocolonial dispossession, and the ongoing racialized and gendered violence of global capitalism. The conference will be organized around four graduate student panels, with a keynote address by Wendy Brown (Institute for Advanced Study) and plenary address by Camila Vergara (University of Essex). Brown’s and Vergara’s distinctive approaches to democratic theory and their respective conceptualizations of political theory’s relation to both citizenly practice and insurgent strategy illuminate the thematic topography of this year’s conference.
The conference departs from the premise that struggles for justice and emancipation emerge and endure through the dynamic interplay of “theory” and “practice,” while one of theory’s foremost tasks is to apprehend and articulate the most generative forms of this interplay within a given historical conjuncture. On one hand, then, the conference explores the stakes, status, and horizon of theory in a political moment marked by ongoing and intensifying crises. What is the task or vocation of political theorizing today, and what does it mean to treat theory as a political activity? How can academic political theorists best respond to the crisis-riven world, beyond issuing familiar calls for ‘interdisciplinarity’ or the ‘decolonization’ of curricula? How ought we to reconceive the concepts of democracy and of democratic theory in the face of present challenges? How, in other words, does or ought political theory to relate to its “outside,” and what forms of theorizing are most appropriate to the present?
- Wendy Brown’s keynote address will take place April 12th at 5pm in Ida Noyes Hall, 3rd floor theater (1212 E. 59th St.)
- Camila Vergara’s plenary address will take place on April 13th at 11:30am at the Franke Institute for the Humanities (1100 E 57th St.)
- A moderated dialogue between Wendy Brown and Camila Vergara will take place on April 13th at 12:45pm at the Franke Institute for the Humanities (1100 E 57th St.)
Please note: persons with a disability who believe they need assistance are requested to call 773-702-8274 in advance.
Schedule and Program
Saturday, April 12th: Franke Institute for the Humanities, 1100 E 57th St.
8:30–9:30am — Breakfast and registration
9:30–9:45am — Welcome remarks
9:45–11:15am — Panel I: Utopia and the political imagination (Discussant: Sankar Muthu)
11:15-11:30am – Break
11:30am-1:00pm — Panel II: Territory, sovereignty, displacement (Discussant: Adom Getachew)
1:00–2:30pm — Catered lunch
2:30—4:00pm — Panel III: Re-visioning institutional democracy (Discussant: James Lindley Wilson)
5:00-6:30pm — Wendy Brown: keynote and Q&A (Ida Noyes Hall, 3rd floor theater, 1212 E. 59th St.)
6:30-7:30pm — Catered reception (Ida Noyes Hall, 3rd Floor Theater)
Sunday, April 13th: Franke Institute for the Humanities, 1100 E 57th St.
8:00–9:30am — Breakfast
9:30–11:15am — Panel IV: Crisis, critique, revolution (Discussant: Linda M.G. Zerilli)
11:15-11:30am – Break
11:30am–12:45pm — Camila Vergara: plenary address and Q&A
12:45–1:30pm — Moderated dialogue between Wendy Brown and Camila Vergara
1:30-3:00pm — Catered lunch
Panel details:
Panel I: Utopia and the political imagination (Saturday, April 12, 9:45-11:15am)
Discussant: Sankar Muthu
Disrupting the Circuits of Violence: Abolition as Antifascism in Angela Davis’s Thought (Michael Mirer – UCLA)
The Politics of Algorithms: Utopia, Despair, and the Limits of Political Imagination (Felicia Jing – Johns Hopkins University)
Creolizing Marxism: José Carlos Mariátegui, the Incan Empire, and ‘the Indian’ (Gabriel Vergara – UMass-Amherst)
Panel II: Territory, sovereignty, displacement (Saturday, April 12, 11:30am-1:00pm)
Discussant: Adom Getachew
The Call for Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS): Dispossession and Displacement as Two Faces of Settler Colonialism (Mirza Abu Bakr Baig – University of Michigan)
Kinship and Loss in a Warming World – Lessons from the Andean ‘Ayllu’ (Lior Hamovitz – Boston University)
The Space of Transformative Continuity: Land, Politics and the Anthropocene in Laura Cornelius Kellogg and Chaim Zhitlowsky (Isaac Stethem – Columbia University)
Panel III: Re-visioning institutional democracy (Saturday, April 12, 2:30-4:00pm)
Discussant: James Lindley Wilson
Toni Morrison’s Political Vision: Schmitt, Mouffe, and the Labor of Political Survival (Columbus De’Marcus Pruitt – Brown University)
Towards a Democratised Rule of Law: Or, the Rule of Law for Radicals (Matthew Haji-Michael – Central European University)
“Conditions of Outward Freedom”: Crystal Eastman’s Political Strategy and the Memory of American Radicalism (Ewa Nizalowska – Cornell University)
Panel IV: Crisis, Critique, Revolution (Sunday, April 13, 9:30-11:15am)
Discussant: Linda M.G. Zerilli
Theory and Actions in the Diligent Work-Frugal Study Movement (Jinxue Chen – Northwestern University)
Contentious Optimism: Temporal Horizons of Possibility, Probability, and Foreclosures (ilkim karakuş – Harvard University)
Means to the End of Freedom: Instrumental Reason and the Possibility of Social Critique (Matthew Cohen – Harvard University)
Articulating Freedom through Autotheoretical Practices (Gabrielle Jourde – Sciences Po)