Seminar Series
After a COVID-induced hiatus, the PSCC research group’s seminar series was revived in spring of 2022. The group holds three to four talks each semester with a focus on young and early career scholars from geography and related disciplines. The series has built a network of scholars engaged with Geography, where invited speakers share and discuss their on-going work with faculty and students at Liverpool. Concurrently, the series aims to increase visibility of the research, writing, and community work done within our research group.
From 2022 to 2024, the talks held were under the series “Transformations of Land, Labour, and Language/Meaning in South Asia.” With regards to land and labour, the series covered to cover issues of agrarian change; political ecology; urban space; different forms of dispossession; organisation and control within the workplace; struggles within the sphere of social reproduction; and the myriad linkages between these. With the focus on meaning and legibility, the commitment was to a scholarship where the social and material are in no way external to the discursive, the ideological, and the cultural. As such, the focus on land, labour, and meaning signaled our intention to understand the multiple arenas of social life as a totality/ensemble i.e. with a view to their mutually constitutive, internal relations.
Since 2024, the series has broadened its scope and is now titled “Critical Theory, Critical Practice”. The series hosts scholars and practitioners engaged with the myriad crises we are facing today from a range of critical geographical perspectives and locations. Throughout, the aim is to confront our world not as disinterested actors, but as engaged subjects: with all the “pessimism of the intellect” at our command and always with an eye towards openings for alternative, emancipatory practices of collective self-determination and creation.
SPRING 2022
Land Rents and Accumulation in Late Industrialisation: Anxieties of Class in Rural India
Dr. Mihika Chatterjee (Lecturer in Development Studies, Department of International Development, University of Oxford)
1.30 to 3pm, Friday 11th March 2022
Location: Lecture Theatre 1. Gordon Stephenson Building
Limitations within the labour market in the context of late industrialisation make ‘work’ on commercial rural land a crucial mode for articulating ‘class’ for local rural elites. In line with recent arguments of rescuing a structural understanding of class that does not eschew culture (Chibber 2017), articulating class here implies reproducing economic dominance over lower rural classes, as well as seeking ‘social distinction’. Using such an understanding of class and based on long-term research in Maharashtra, India, I argue that even when dominant caste land farmers exit farming, they seek ‘distinction’ through norms and practices rooted in local agrarian labour relations. To understand the economic demand for rural land in a rapidly urbanising context in much of the Global South, we need to focus on the labour regime and the possibilities such a regime offers for the articulation of class.
Part of the Seminar Series “Transformations in Land, Labour, and Meaning” organised by the Power, Space, and Cultural Change Cluster, Department of Geography and Planning.
Periyar E. V Ramasamy: A Study in Political Atheism
Dr. Karthick Ram Manoharan (Marie Skłodowska-Curie Research Fellow, University of Wolverhampton)
Date and Time: 3pm to 4.30pm, Friday 13th May 2022, Location: Gordon Stephenson Lecture Theatre 1
Periyar .V. Ramasamy (1879-1973) was a rationalist anti-caste leader from South India. Known for his critical views on caste, nationalism, gender, and social justice, he earned a controversial reputation in his lifetime and after for his views on religion. Criticized by his opponents for being a 'crude atheist', Periyar's critique of religion however was not a simple rejection of god, but a critique of political theology. In this paper, I discuss Periyar's controversial, sometimes contradictory, but overall nuanced approach to religion, and explore how his criticisms of religion were fundamentally rooted in an opposition to hierarchical social power and a concern for social justice. I read Periyar in the anarchist tradition, drawing comparisons with the Russian anarchist Mikhail Bakunin, to consider how Periyar was critical of both divine and secular power.
Part of the Seminar Series “Transformations in Land, Labour, and Meaning” organised by the Power, Space, and Cultural Change Cluster, Department of Geography and Planning.
Military Hegemony in the Afterlife of Peasant Struggle: Northwestern Pakistan in the 1980s
Dr. Noaman Ali (Assist. Prof in Political Economy, Lahore University of Management Sciences, Pakistan)
3pm to 4.30pm, Friday 10th June 2022
Location: Gordon Stephenson Lecture Room Theatre 1
How do military regimes exercise and maintain power? This study examines how the military regime of General Zia ul-Haq intervened in struggles between landlords and tenants in the Charsadda District of Pakistan in the 1980s, following a decade of peasant land occupations that shifted the balance of class power in these areas. I contend that significant shifts in practices of power in did not correspond neatly to transitions between military and civilian regimes. Rather, these shifts depended on what a particular regime considered to be effective mechanisms of rule considering the balance of forces between landed elites and an armed peasant movement. I show how military and civilian regimes both sought to sustain the autonomous power of landed elites outside of the state apparatus when it was useful in containing peasants. However, where peasant struggle made the autonomous power of landed elites untenable, both types of regimes pursued new techniques of rule involving similar practices of generating consent and exercising coercion.
Part of the Seminar Series "Transformations of Land, Labour, and Meaning in South Asia" organised by the Power, Space, and Cultural Change Cluster, Department of Geography and Planning
FALL 2022
Tax collector as a ‘street level bureaucrat’: Property tax, low-income housing, and urban governance in Dhaka, Bangladesh
Dr. Shreyashi Dasgupta, Department of Geography and Planning, University of Liverpool
Friday 18th November 2022, 1 to 2.30pm
Venue: Lecture Theatre 2, Rendall Building
Cities continue to rely on property taxes as an important measure for economic growth, building revenue, and financing municipal services. The understanding of ‘property’ in cities of the Global South can be varied given the complicated land ownership and the paradoxical typologies of low-income housing that are often hard to classify. In this talk, I will discuss how are properties defined, on what basis is the tax collected and under what conditions? Based on interviews with revenue officials including the tax collector, this talk revisits Lipsky’s (1971) concept of a ‘street level bureaucrat’ to understand routine decision-making processes in Dhaka’s rental accommodations. In doing so, it engages with debates on the practice of governance, the blurred formal and informal nature of tax collection, speculative strategies of enforcement, and the role of the everyday state.
Part of the Seminar Series “Transformations in Land, Labour, and Meaning” organised by the Power, Space, and Cultural Change Cluster, Department of Geography and Planning.
SPRING 2023
A Significance for Brick: Architecture and the Public in Lahore, Pakistan
Dr. Chris Moffat (Senior Lecturer in South Asian History, QMUL)
1.30 to 3pm, Friday 24th February 2023
Location: Lecture Theatre 1. Rendall Building
This paper explores how Pakistan’s architectural histories might offer insights into the postcolonial career of ‘the public’ as a category, and particularly its intersections with questions of urban history, aesthetics and politics, security and risk. It focuses on the career of Nayyar Ali Dada (b.1943), arguably Pakistan’s most celebrated architect, and his design for a prize-winning arts centre in Lahore. Along the way, it sketches the contours of a major Pakistani metropolis, reaching from Lahore’s Mughal fortress to its minor brick kilns, from colonial art schools to contemporary shopping malls.
Part of the Seminar Series “Transformations in Land, Labour, and Meaning” organised by the Power, Space, and Cultural Change Cluster, Department of Geography and Planning.
Market exchange in the Pakistani informal economy: patronage, exploitation, or both?
Dr. Asha Amirali (Research Associate, Centre for Development Studies, University of Bath)
2pm to 3.30pm, Friday 21st April 2023
Location: Eleanor Rathbone Building, Room 201
Through examination of business in a Pakistani agricultural market, this paper will argue that patronage does not mask exploitation as much as it sweetens it through the construction of solidarities that are – barring sudden and drastic changes to the distribution of rights and resources – displaced only by conflict on their own terms. Patronage is therefore not only a ‘Faustian bargain’ or a rational outcome of inequalities of status and wealth; rather, patron-client relationships are more deeply rooted and meaningful for the persons involved than most of us might want to admit. The implications of this are significantly more important than acknowledged by development scholars and practitioners.
Part of the Seminar Series “Transformations in Land, Labour, and Meaning in South Asia” organised by the Power, Space, and Cultural Change Cluster, Department of Geography and Planning.
Heavy Tweeters and the Loud Television Hosts: A Tale of Alienated Protesting Farmers of India
Vignesh Karthik (India Institute, King's College London); Co-Authors: Vihang Jumle and Ajay Chandra Vasagam
1.30pm to 3pm, 12th May 2023
Venue: Rendall Lecture Theatre 3
Recent developments in social media in India make it evident that news channels are deliberately attempting to construct a social media model like the existing television media model, to allow them to saturate the public discourse with narratives that suit their cause. Strategised and effective political messaging through prominent media platforms (conventional and social) played an integral role in the continued dominance of India's ruling dispensation of the Indian Union in the public sphere. We posit the farmer protests in response to the three farm legislations passed in mid-2020 by the Government of India and how the dispensation-pliant conventional media amplified the narrative of the protests projected in social media. Using data from mainstream TV debates and Twitter between 17 January 2021 and 17 February 2021, we show autonomous yet concerted effort to construct a certain narrative around these protests, often one that suited the government. We observe that this concerted effort, coupled with a strong party presence, denies the protesting groups a level playing field to disseminate their grievances.
Part of the Seminar Series “Transformations in Land, Labour, and Meaning in South Asia” organised by the Power, Space, and Cultural Change Cluster, Department of Geography and Planning.
FALL 2023
Refugee Cities: How Afghans Changed Urban Pakistan (Book Talk)
Dr. Sanaa Alimia (Aga Khan University London)
Discussants: Dr. Arshad Isakjee and Dr. Ruth Cheung-Judge
Friday 20th October 2023, 3pm
Rendall Lecture Theatre 1
Situated between the 1970s Soviet Union's invasion of Afghanistan and the post–2001 War on Terror, Refugee Cities tells the story of how global wars affect everyday life for Afghans who have been living as refugees in Pakistan. This book provides a necessary glimpse of what ordinary life looks like for a long-term refugee population, beyond the headlines of war, terror, or helpless suffering. It also increases our understanding of how cities—rather than the nation—are important sites of identity-making for people of migrant origins.
In Refugee Cities, Sanaa Alimia reconstructs local microhistories to chronicle the lives of ordinary people living in low-income neighborhoods in Peshawar and Karachi and the ways in which they have transformed the cities of which they are a part. In Pakistan, formal citizenship is almost impossible for Afghans to access; despite this, Afghans have made new neighborhoods, expanded city boundaries, built cities through their labor in construction projects, and created new urban identities—and often they have done so alongside Pakistanis. Their struggles are a crucial, neglected dimension of Pakistan's urban history. Yet given that the Afghan experience in Pakistan is profoundly shaped by geopolitics, the book also documents how, in the War-on-Terror era, many Afghans have been forced to leave Pakistan. This book, then, is also a documentation of the multiple displacements migrants are subject to and the increased normalization of deportation as a part of “refugee management."
Part of the Seminar Series “Transformations in Land, Labour, and Meaning in South Asia” organised by the Power, Space, and Cultural Change Cluster, Department of Geography and Planning.
The Struggle for Hegemony in Pakistan: Fear, Desire and Revolutionary Horizons (Book Talk)
Dr. Aasim Sajjad Akhtar (Quaid-e-Azam University, Pakistan)
Discussants: Dr. Rob Knox and Dr. Tayyaba Jiwani
Friday 27th October 2023, 3pm
Roxby Building, Room 101
The collapse of neoliberal hegemony in the western world following the financial crash of 2007-8 and subsequent rise of right-wing authoritarian personalities has been described as a crisis of ‘the political’ in western societies. But the crisis must be seen as global, rather than focusing on the west alone.
Pakistan is experiencing rapid financialisation and rapacious capture of natural resources, overseen by the country’s military establishment and state bureaucracy. Under their watch, trading and manufacturing interests, property developers and a plethora of mafias have monopolised the provision of basic needs like housing, water and food, whilst also feeding conspicuous consumption by a captive middle-class.
Aasim Sajjad-Akhtar explores neoliberal Pakistan, looking at digital technology in enhancing mass surveillance, commodification and atomisation, as well as resistance to the state and capital. Presenting a new interpretation of our global political-economic moment, he argues for an emancipatory political horizon embodied by the ‘classless’ subject.
Part of the Seminar Series “Transformations in Land, Labour, and Meaning in South Asia” organised by the Power, Space, and Cultural Change Cluster, Department of Geography and Planning.
Urban Revolutions: Urbanisation and (Neo-)Colonialism in Transatlantic Context (Book Talk)
Prof. Stefan Kipfer (York University, Toronto)
Discussants: Dr. Andy Davies and Dr. Amal Abu-Bakare
Tuesday 14th November 2023, 3pm
Roxby Building, Room 101
What do struggles over pipelines in Canada, housing estates in France, and shantytowns in Martinique have in common? In Urban Revolutions, Stefan Kipfer shows how these struggles force us to understand the (neo-)colonial aspects of capitalist urbanization in a comparatively and historically nuanced fashion. In so doing, he demonstrates that urban research can offer a rich, if uneven, terrain upon which to develop the relationship between Marxist and anti-colonial intellectual traditions. After a detailed dialogue between Henri Lefebvre and Frantz Fanon, Kipfer engages creole literature in the French Antilles, Indigenous radicalism in North America and political anti-racism in mainland France.
Spectacular Futures, Development Brokers, and Bankrupt Vistas in Post-War Sri Lanka
Dr.Thiruni Kelegama (Lecturer in South Asian Studies, University of Oxford)
Wednesday 29th November 2023, 3pm
Lecture Theatre 3, Rendall Building
This talk examines how elite brokers reshape sovereignty and territorial control through mega-infrastructure development in the Indian Ocean region. Through an ethnographic study of the US$14 billion Chinese-funded Colombo Port City development in Sri Lanka, it analyses how presidentially appointed Commissioners exercise unprecedented authority over territorial governance through three interrelated mechanisms: legal-institutional innovation that creates exceptional jurisdictions, physical transformation of maritime space, and economic regulation that engineers specialised zones. These ‘infrastructure brokers’ represent a fundamental departure from traditional development intermediaries who operate at society’s margins. Unlike conventional brokers who mediate within existing frameworks, these elite actors architect new institutional arrangements that simultaneously extend and transcend state authority. Operating at the nexus of state power and international capital, they produce differentiated zones of governance that accommodate global investment while maintaining assertions of national control. By revealing how territorial authority is reconfigured through the intersection of elite agency and spatial production, this analysis contributes to understanding sovereignty’s transformation in an era of mega-infrastructure competition across the Global South.
Part of the Seminar Series “Transformations in Land, Labour, and Meaning in South Asia” organised by the Power, Space, and Cultural Change Cluster, Department of Geography and Planning.
SPRING 2024
Muslim Grandmothers of the Shaheen Bagh Movement and their Radical Performance of Care
Alisha Ibkar (University of Manchester)
8th May 2024, 2pm
Roxby Building, 6th Floor Conference Room
My talk takes up the historic Anti-Citizenship Amendment Act protests of 2019 led by the elderly muslim women of Shaheen Bagh and looks at it through the lens of care ethics and performance. The dadis (grandmothers) of Shaheen Bagh drew on their experience of caregiving and nurture to create a unique repertoire of protest strategies where in care played a central role, both as a representative human practice and a form of political expression, and in the process offered a radical reimagination of feminist protests organising and performance. I elucidate how the dadis of Shaheen Bagh did not only make possible a novel narrative of careful political resistance, but also demonstrated how the everyday practice of undervalued maternal care can be a legitimate response and lesson in careful governance for the State that is largely uncaring towards its disenfranchised population.
Part of the Seminar Series “Transformations in Land, Labour, and Meaning in South Asia” organised by the Power, Space, and Cultural Change Cluster, Department of Geography and Planning.
Knowing polluted waters: cosmopolitical inhabitation at the littoral
Dr Niranjana R (QMUL)
22nd May 2024, 2pm
Roxby Building, 4th Floor Meeting Room
In the Ennore-Pazhaverkadu wetlands north of Chennai, it is not unusual for a heavily polluted river estuary to disappear from official maps; for pipelines carrying oil or ammonia gas to leak spontaneously into coastal waters; and for fishers who rely on these waters to be told that it is not known how or why these things happen. The innocence from knowledge, however, only extends as far as the next plan for a coastal infrastructure project, which mobilises ‘expertise’ towards determining norms of habitation alongside the sea, the rivers and their estuaries. For fishers, whose embodied knowledge is much romanticised, this poses a challenge - what does it mean to know these continually polluted waters? How to even get to know water that behaves in such un-natural ways? How would that knowledge ultimately help in making a living? This paper explores the conundrum, attending to the socio-natural and multi-natural practices employed by fishers in navigating this fragmenting geography. It suggests that they offer cosmopolitical (Stengers, 2002) ways of reimagining inhabitation at the littoral.
Part of the Seminar Series “Transformations in Land, Labour, and Meaning in South Asia” organised by the Power, Space, and Cultural Change Cluster, Department of Geography and Planning.
A Blueprint for Anti-casteist AI systems
Dr Shyam Krishna R (Alan Turing Institute)
22nd May 2024, 3.30pm
Roxby Building, 4th Floor Meeting Room
In this talk I will discuss research at the intersection of caste and AI, focusing on caste as a sociocultural marker and a political issue, but often obscured and inadequately conceptualised in AI design, its datasets and outputs. I seek to distil an ontological interpretation of caste and to forward an anti-casteist ethical approach to the design, policy and governance of AI and algorithmic technologies. I propose as first principles, Dr. B.R. Ambedkar’s treatise on caste and its ‘mechanism, genesis and development’. From this and other literature, some main explanatory aspects can be identified and interpreted for AI contexts.
The topic is ostensibly Indian-centric, but the issue of caste has obvious global implications given the diasporic movements and the prominence of Indian professionals in the AI landscape. This recognition is at the core of this inquiry, that caste is deeply rooted in who is afforded the agency to influence technology and AI globally. It follows then, that the supply chain of AI, from data production to algorithm design, has an influence on the diasporic movement of dominant caste technologists, particularly to innovation hubs like Silicon Valley. Through this, I argue for a practical, ex-post and ex-ante framework for both an ideologically anti-casteist mechanism and applied ethical assurance in AI.
Part of the Seminar Series “Transformations in Land, Labour, and Meaning in South Asia” organised by the Power, Space, and Cultural Change Cluster, Department of Geography and Planning.
FALL 2024
'Race’, racism and anti-racism in Communist Czechoslovakia, 1948-1989
Dr Matej Blazek (University of Newcastle)
8th October 2024, 3pm
Roxby Building 6th Floor Seminar Room
This presentation seeks to take the geographical scholarship concerned with anti-racist politics and genealogies of racism beyond the context of European and North American (post-)colonial histories. It explores how the notion of ‘race’ was culturally produced in science, education and literature during the forty-one years of the Communist Party’s rule in Czechoslovakia. It tracks the earlier effort of the Communist state to formulate anti-racism as a scientifically grounded politics aligned with its principal ideology, before this effort dissipated on the back of the contradictions with the state’s own perception of the decolonial movements of the 1960s and with its own racial politics towards Roma people, and explores the implications of this history for geographical scholarship on racism and anti-racism.
Part of the Seminar Series “Critical Theory, Critical Practice” organised by the Power, Space, and Cultural Change Cluster, Department of Geography and Planning.
Antiblackness and Global Health: Thinking epidemic responses in the colonial wake (Book Talk)
Dr Lioba Hirsch (University of Edinburgh)
23rd October 2024, 3pm
Roxby Building, 6th Floor Seminar Room
Lioba joins us to discuss her recently published book Antiblackness and Global Health: A response to Ebola in the Colonial Wake (Pluto Press), which explores the persistent coloniality of global health interventions on the African continent, the racial and racist entanglements of humanitarian responses to medical emergencies and the methodological, intellectual and practical possibilities to foreground postcolonial voices in this debate.
Part of the Seminar Series “Critical Theory, Critical Practice” organised by the Power, Space, and Cultural Change Cluster, Department of Geography and Planning.
The Possibility of Reproduction: Work, Settlement, and Life on Pakistan’s Urbanizing Peripheries (Book Talk)
Dr. Waqas Butt (University of Toronto)
Discussant: Dr. Shreyashi Dasgupta
Friday 1st November, 3pm; Seminar Room 6, South Campus Teaching Hub
Like many cities in Pakistan, Lahore’s waste infrastructures depend upon the everyday labor performed by low- or noncaste (Dalit) groups. This form of labor—waste work—takes away and disposes waste materials from certain spaces and makes them present elsewhere. Moving waste materials as they do across urban landscapes, waste infrastructures are entangled with the spatial dynamics of uneven urbanization in Lahore. This paper traces such dynamics by detailing shifts in settlement, work, and life experienced by waste workers and their kin as they have migrated to Lahore’s urbanizing peripheries over the past several decades. Low- or noncaste groups in Punjab have historically been landless labor, working under a variety of coercive relations with landowning groups from upper-caste backgrounds, engaging in different kinds of agrarian work and being settled on the land owned by others. As they have settled on Lahore’s urbanizing peripheries, they have sought out opportunities for work, employment, and income in the city’s expanding waste infrastructures, which has reworked forms of settlement, work, and indebtedness across generations. Just as reproduction occurs at intergenerational and domestic scales, it unfolds also at the scale of workers’ bodies, where their lives and bodies are exhausted through laboring with waste materials. This paper thus argues that reproduction is a distributed process unfolding across multiple though distinct spatiotemporal scales—from the intergenerational and domestic to the collective and individual. In delineating such spatiotemporal scales, it highlights how forms of life built upon caste-based relations have not only been reproduced through their transformation in Lahore but also reveals the constitutive texture of uneven urbanization across Pakistan.
Part of the Seminar Series “Critical Theory, Critical Practice” organised by the Power, Space, and Cultural Change Cluster, Department of Geography and Planning.
The Mine Dumps of Silicon Valley: American Hegemony, South African Science, and the Global Circulation of Experts
Dr. Efthimios (Tim) Karaiyannides (University of Cambridge)
Friday 22nd November 2024, 2.30pm to 4pm
Mathematical Sciences, Lecture Room 103
Numerous commentators have drawn attention to the surprising number of Silicon Valley’s Right with connections to Southern Africa. For some critics on the Left, the Apartheid connections of tech CEOs like Elon Musk and Peter Thiel are enough to explain their authoritarian approach to corporate governance and their political affinity with Donald Trump. This paper will argue that the South African tech moguls are less aberrant imports and more products of American hegemony. It will show how the combination of job reservations under Apartheid and the Bretton Woods system produced a generation of white South African professionals with expertise which were suddenly at a premium in the wake of the economic shocks of the 1970s. Following the flow of expertise out of Apartheid South Africa and into American finance and tech in the last two decades of the 20th century, I suggest new ways of understanding the structural shifts and global intellectual networks which produced transformations of the global economy that are conventionally placed under the banner of “neoliberalism”.
Part of the Seminar Series “Critical Theory, Critical Practice” organised by the Power, Space, and Cultural Change Cluster, Department of Geography and Planning.
SPRING 2025
Music as Resistance: An Introduction to Palestinian Singing and Culture, by Reem Kelani
Thursday, 6th of February 2025, 3:30pm-5:00pm
Waterhouse Block J, 1st Floor Large Seminar Room
Palestinian musician Reem Kelani has performed in festivals from Seattle to Shanghai and Syria. She has also pioneered the introduction of Arabic music in schools and with choirs across the United Kingdom. In her forthcoming workshop for the PSCC Critical Thought and Practice Seminar Series, Reem will touch on the principles of Arabic music and rhythm, as well as provide an overview of the vital role played by music and creative expression in Palestine’s resistance against occupation and struggle for liberation. Reem is a singer, musician, broadcaster, translator and educator. Described by some as the unofficial ambassador for the culture and music of Palestine, she was born in Manchester and spent her formative years in Kuwait, where she was exposed to numerous styles of music from the Gulf, Iraq, Iran, Yemen, India, and East Africa. Reem started performing in public at the age of four, and it was a wedding in her maternal hometown of Nazareth she attended at the age of nine that is the seminal moment that focused her attention on collective Palestinian traditions. With the album “Sprinting Gazelle – Palestinian Songs from the Motherland and the Diaspora” officially recommended as part of the UK school curriculum, Reem has shown how her art transcends cultural boundaries and appeals as much to a non-Arab as an Arab audience. Come and enjoy this most inspirational of performers. All are welcome.
Part of the Seminar Series “Critical Theory, Critical Practice” organised by the Power, Space, and Cultural Change Cluster, Department of Geography and Planning.
Insurgent Social Reproduction: the home, the barricade and women’s work in the 1936 Palestinian Revolution
Dr. Mai Taha (LSE)
Monday 17th March 2025, 3pm
Mathematical Sciences, Lecture Room 106
While the Palestinian home has been a target of relentless demolition and displacement, it has historically also been a place of care, culture, labour, and resistance. Indeed, the home is always becoming, constantly remade with every demolition and every displacement. The home embodies these contradictions: both a crime scene and a revolutionary space; a site of colonial surveillance and destruction, and a grounding site of labour and reconstruction. To engage with these tensions, I return to the revolution of 1936-1939 against the British Mandate, a snapshot in the long and ongoing Palestinian revolution. But instead of only looking for revolutionaries in the barricades and the mountains, I look for them in the kitchens, in the bedrooms and in the living rooms. In that sense, I propose that the production of the home space is itself a conceptual site of theorization for what I call insurgent social reproduction.
As part of "Critical Theory, Critical Practice" Seminar Series of the Power, Space, and Cultural Change (PSCC) Research Cluster
Geographies of Boycott: Palestine and anti-colonial Marxism
Dr. Hashem Abushama (Oxford)
Monday 18th March 2025, 3pm
Mathematical Sciences, Lecture Room 106
As part of "Critical Theory, Critical Practice" Seminar Series of the Power, Space, and Cultural Change (PSCC) Research Cluster
Thinking with Fanon and Gramsci, this paper foregrounds practices of cultural boycott across the map of historic Palestine as an entry point into thinking about resistance against colonial violence. Inspired by Gramsci’s methodological formulations on consent, coercion, and political and civil society, the paper theorises boycotts as an arena of elaboration for an embodied spatialization of anti-colonial and anti-capitalist resistance. It thinks with Stuart Hall and his expansion of Gramsci’s formulations to make sense of notions of cultural resistance. The paper insists on reading the boycott as a spatio-temporal practice that enables a critique of Israeli settler colonialism, Palestinian nationalism, and class politics in Palestine. In doing so, I think about the antagonism between the colonizer and the colonized as one that is mediated through spatial difference and the multiple axes of social difference (gender, race, and class). There is already a Fanonian refusal at play here; colonial violence should not be seen as overdetermining and encompassing to the complexities of the social life of the colonized, but as historically produced by and through these complexities.
As part of "Critical Theory, Critical Practice" Seminar Series of the Power, Space, and Cultural Change (PSCC) Research Cluster
FALL 2025
Falasteen Hurra Hurra: On-the-Ground in the Occupied West Bank
Farah and Leda (International Solidarity Movement)
Wednesday 10 December 2025, 1pm
Rendall Seminar Room 9
This seminar features international volunteers supporting Palestinian communities that are resisting Zionist settler colonialism and ethnic cleansing at the hands of the Israeli state. Drawing from on-the-ground civil protection with families experiencing home demolitions and forced evictions, the talk details the socio-spatial dimensions of Israel's illegal occupation of the West Bank. Speakers also offer insight into how militarised repression affects mental health and material wellbeing. The discussion situates the dynamics above within a wider continuum of structural violence against Palestine, including the Gaza genocide, to illustrate how dehumanisation and domination are coordinated across time and space, i.e., histories and geographies. In addition, the speakers reflect upon Palestinian steadfastness, hope, and reparative world-making in the face of the silence, cynicism, and failures of complicit universities, international law, and liberal humanitarianism.
As part of "Critical Theory, Critical Practice" Seminar Series of the Power, Space, and Cultural Change (PSCC) Research Cluster
SPRING 2026
In Defense of Historical Specificity: Theorizing Racial Capitalism with Stuart Hall
Dr. Sara Bufkin (Assistant Professor in Political Theory, University of Birmingham)
Wednesday 11th February 2026, 3 to 4.30pm
Location: Rendall, Seminar Room 4
In this talk, I intervene in recent debates over how to theorize racial capitalism by returning to the work of Stuart Hall. Hall never used the concept of “racial capitalism” himself, but he spent a good deal of time working out a version of Marxism that could adequately account for the “colonial relation” and for the racisms operative in the UK as a declining imperial metropole. Hall adopted a conjunctural approach to the critique of racialized capitalisms — a method which descended from the abstract level of formal theories of capital to the concrete analysis of discrete capitalist formations, structured in racial dominance. Crucially, he claimed that these historical articulations between capital accumulation and racism were contingent constellations that had to be produced and then reproduced — and that they were more contradictory, ambivalent and one might say “lumpy” or “fractious’ relations than many abstractly functionalist accounts of racial capitalism would presume. I argue that Hall's approach makes space for a more sustained consideration of both (a) the state and (b) a materialist account of popular culture in shaping the terrain upon which racisms and racializations take shape.
As part of "Critical Theory, Critical Practice" Seminar Series of the Power, Space, and Cultural Change (PSCC) Research Cluster
The Costs of War for American Democracy
Dr. Jennifer Greenburg (Lecturer in International Relations, University of Sheffield)
Friday 13th March 2026, 1 to 2.30pm
Rendall Seminar Room 4
This talk begins from the present moment of political crisis in the United States. For the last 15 years, the Costs of War project at Brown University has shed light on the economic, human, environmental, and social costs of US wars and military spending. Today, many of these costs are relevant to the rise of authoritarianism within the United States. Drawing on a multi-year collaborative study with the Costs of War project that has sought to deepen public inquiry into everyday understandings of war and militarism, this talk places ethnographic findings into conversation with Gramscian geographies to ask how “common sense” perceptions of militarism relate to the unfolding crisis of US hegemony. By elaborating what Gramsci called a “politico-military relation of force,” this talk will develop a conjunctural analysis of US militarism to consider the challenges of militarism and authoritarianism today.
As part of "Critical Theory, Critical Practice" Seminar Series of the Power, Space, and Cultural Change (PSCC) Research Cluster
Interpreting the Conjuncture, 20th March 2026
The Southern Question (Book Talk)
Dr. Jordan T. Camp (Trinity College, USA) and
Shadows Without Bodies: Conjunctural Analysis from Karl Marx to Antonio Gramsci
Christina Heatherton (Trinity College, USA)
Friday 20th March 2026
Time and Venue TBD
Overview:
To better understand the global flourishing of authoritarianism and fascism Jordan T. Camp and Christina Heatherton will offer an interpretation of the conjuncture. Camp will discuss insights from his forthcoming book entitled, The Southern Question. There he “translates” Antonio Gramsci’s conjunctural analysis through a dialogue with thinkers such as W.E.B. Du Bois, Angela Y. Davis, C.L.R. James, Walter Rodney, Ruth First, and Stuart Hall. “In Shadows Without Bodies,” Heatherton situates Gramsci’s conjunctural analysis as a dialogue with Karl Marx’s The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte and Friedrich Engels’s writing on Boulangism – or as it is more popularly understood in critical geography, revanchism. She considers conjunctural analysis as a method of political intervention against stridency and despair.
Bios
Since the 2008 economic crisis, Jordan T. Camp and Christina Heatherton have worked with social movements to develop theoretically driven interventions in the present. Their collaborations like Policing the Planet: Why the Policing Crisis Led to Black Lives Matter (Verso, 2016) have addressed the conjoined crises of racism, capitalism, militarism, and policing. Their podcast and webseries series Conjuncture which they have co-hosted and co-produced since 2021, is inspired by the conjunctural analysis of Antonio Gramsci and Stuart Hall. Together, with Stefan Kipfer, and Ayyaz Mallick, they are co-editing a special issue of the journal Antipode on “New Directions in Gramscian Studies.” They are also co-editing a volume entitled, Conjuncture. They are founding co-directors of the Trinity Social Justice Institute at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut.
Jordan T. Camp is an Associate Professor of American Studies at Trinity College. He is the author of Incarcerating the Crisis: Freedom Struggles and the Rise of the Neoliberal State (University of California Press, 2016); and co-editor (with Laura Pulido) of the late Clyde Woods’ book, Development Drowned and Reborn: The Blues and Bourbon Restorations in Post-Katrina New Orleans (University of Georgia Press, 2017). His newest book The Southern Question is forthcoming on the American Crossroads series of the University of California Press.
Christina Heatherton is the author of Arise! Global Radicalism in the Era of the Mexican Revolution (University of California Press, 2022), the Spanish translation of which will be published by La Cigarra Press (Mexico City, Mexico) in 2026. She is completing a new project about surveillance, capitalism, and abolition entitled, “Shadows Without Bodies.” She is currently the inaugural Everett and Joanne Elting Associate Professor for Human Rights and Global Citizenship and Associate Professor of American Studies and Human Rights at Trinity College in Hartford, CT.
As part of "Critical Theory, Critical Practice" Seminar Series of the Power, Space, and Cultural Change (PSCC) Research Cluster