2024 LONDON CRITICAL THEORY SUMMER SCHOOL at The Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities

 

Upcoming public debates   2024 LONDON CRITICAL THEORY SUMMER SCHOOL The Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities' annual London Critical Theory Summer School is taking place from 24 June to 5 July. The 2024 Summer School is run once again on Birkbeck's campus in central London, but we are also offering a reduced virtual programme to those who are either unable to travel or unable to commit to the full in-person event. The Summer School explores the genealogy and reach of critical theory, whilst encouraging intellectual elaboration and reflection. Our aim is to stimulate progressive, dissident being and thinking. The necessity for such thinking is as critical as ever today. Across the world reactionary and racist governments enshrine inhumane policies in law, and turn their eyes away from climate catastrophe. Over the past years, some right populist politicians have been defeated, others have been elected (Italy, Finland), or are aiming at a second chance in power. The world is faced with increased inequality, inhumane asylum policies, licensed ethno-nationalism, so-called 'culture wars', and vicious misogyny, newly exposed but undefeated. As we write, the Russian assault on Ukraine continues and the conflict in Israel-Palestine has been pitched into new levels of violence. We now exist on the other side of a global pandemic that introduced and extended myriad social and technological changes whose long-term effects remain to be understood. At the same time, we are offered hope by the rise in protest movements, even when met with the increased force of state, and the creativity of cultural and artistic production whose energies and commitment promise a better future. Our summer school offers a place to explore the ramifications of all this and to ask what it means to wield criticism against contemporary oppression while turning our thought towards freedom. This internationally renowned Summer School enables graduate students and academics to engage in a two-week course of day-time study with acclaimed critical thinkers. At the end of each week, these thinkers join together for a public panel discussion. We are delighted to welcome Juliet Jacques and Isaac Julien, alongside our returning speakers, Costas Douzinas, Oscar Guardiola-Rivera, Kojo Koram, Laura Mulvey, Esther Leslie, Jacqueline Rose and Slavoj Žižek.  Both panel debates are open to all and free to attend either in situ or online. They will be recorded and livestreamed.     2024 LONDON CRITICAL THEORY FRIDAY DEBATE #1 Date: Friday 28th June 14:00-16:00 (BST). Venue: Clore Lecture Theatre, Birkbeck Clore Management Centre Register SPEAKERS -  Juliet Jacques, writer, filmmaker and Visiting Lecturer on the Contemporary Art Practice MA at the Royal College of Arts, London. - Laura Mulvey (Professor of Film Studies at Birkbeck, University of London) - Esther Leslie (Professor of Political Aesthetics, Birkbeck, and Co-Director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities)  CHAIR - Jacqueline Rose (Professor of Humanities, Birkbeck University of London, and Co-Director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities)  The event is free but registration is required.   2024 LONDON CRITICAL THEORY FRIDAY DEBATE #2 Date: Friday 5th July, 14:00-16:00. Venue: Clore Lecture Theatre, Birkbeck Clore Management Centre This week's session will be chaired by Prof Esther Leslie (Professor of Political Aesthetics, Birkbeck, University of London, and Co-Director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities). Register SPEAKERS - Costas Douzinas (Visiting Professor of Law at the University of Athens, Greece, Professor of Law, Birkbeck University of London, and Founding Director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities)  - Oscar Guardiola-Rivera (Professor of Human Rights and Political Philosophy, Birkbeck, University of London) - Isaac Julien (nstallation artist, filmmaker and Distinguished Professor of the Arts at the University of California, Santa Cruz) - Kojo Koram (Reader in Law at Birkbeck, University of London) - Jacqueline Rose (Professor of Humanities, Birkbeck University of London, and Co-Director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities)  - Slavoj Žižek (International Director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities)  The event is free but registration is required.   FEATURING Oscar Guardiola-Rivera´s  Biography: Author of two critically acclaimed books  What If Latin America Ruled the World? (Bloomsbury, 2010) was listed as a Book of the Year, Non-fiction by the Financial Times, won the Frantz Fanon Award for Outstanding Writing by the Caribbean Philosophical Association, 2010, was nominated for the Gladstone Prize 2011 and for the George Orwell Award for Political Writing, and was features by the BBC Today programme with Andrew Marr.  Story of a Death Foretold (Bloomsbury, 2013) was shortlisted for the 2014 Bread & Roses Award, and listed as a Book of the Year, Non-Fiction by The Observer in 2013. More recently, he has published In Defence of Armed/Art Struggle (Bogota: UTadeo, 2019), “A Future for the Philosophy of Liberation” in Decolonising Ethics (Pennsylvania University Press, 2020), and the poetic novel Night of the World (The 87 Press, forthcoming 2021). He is a Fellow of the RSA. His “Peace & War” Reformation and the docu-video “Art & Fire: A Journey in Five Films”, with Hay Festivals, are available at  https://hayfestival.com  He has been the recipient of grants by the Leverhulme Trust and CAPES, among others, for research and teaching on peace-making, mediation and conflict-resolution, political philosophy and legal theory, art & human rights, human rights and international law, peoples' tribunals, advanced constitutional law and ethics, with an emphasis on decolonial and visual methodologies, political economy, and racial justice.    He curated the 2018 Global '68 exhibition & conference in Paris and London together with Françoise Vergés and Marcus Rediker, and the 2017 Global Art Forum with Shumon Basra and Antonia Carver. Since at least 2015 he has curated the yearly 'Focus on the Funk' gathering between some of the most important thinkers, artists and activists interested in issues of social and racial justice today. He has taught at the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities, and regularly collaborates with Monocle Radio, BBC and BBC World Service, The Guardian, The Independent and El Espectador among other public media.