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, Princeton University) 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?
On the other hand, the conference interrogates the fructuous tensions between reparative democratic practices of listening and storytelling and more insurgent, even violent, forms of emancipatory politics. How can narrative, avowal, and listening be mobilized in service of justice and liberation? When might these practices fail? How do disavowal and denial serve to undermine projects of emancipation? What forms of organization and institutionalization are most amenable to liberatory projects and politics, and how are these nourished by attention to testimony and a reciprocal politics of witness? What horizons of emancipation are indexed by contemporary practice, beyond the reciprocal exchange of reasons and recognition? Finally, how might the concrete activity of emancipation transform the theorist as a putative subject of knowledge?
We welcome papers that speak directly or indirectly to the following themes:
- Insurgent democracy
- The politics of social movements
- Constituent power and radical constitutionalism
- Democratic imaginaries within and beyond the nation state
- Non-sovereign social and political organization
- Representation and direct democracy
- Citizenship and the category of the ‘citizen’
- Theory and practice within and beyond the academy
- Democratic theory in times of crisis
- Ecology and degrowth communisms
- Utopia and futurity
- Political pessimism
- Democracy, speech, and discourse
- Knowledge, power, and ideology
- Political violence
- Crisis, urgency, and temporality
To submit a proposal for consideration, please click here.
Proposals should be between 750-1,000 words and must be submitted by December 27, 2024.