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IHSS

Aporias of activism

When: Tuesday, April 12, 2022, 2:00 PM - 4:00 PM
Where: Online, Ms Teams

Speaker: Professor Engin Isin (Queen Mary University of London)

Professor Engin Isin lead a discussion on repertoires of activism with recent books by Erin Pineda on Seeing Like an Activist: Civil Disobedience and the Civil Rights Movement (2021) and Andreas Malm's How to Blow up a Pipeline: Learning to Fight in a World on Fire (2021). 

These books revisit the perennial dilemmas of political action such as violence versus non-violence, passivism versus activism, direct versus indirect, legal versus illegal, and individual versus collective in social and political movements and the legitimacy, justifiability, and transversality of various acts ranging from submission to disobedience. The discussion will invite participants to share their experiences especially in climate activism and border activism.

About the speaker

Professor Engin Isin is Professor of International Politics in School of Politics and International Relations, Queen Mary University of London. His work concerns the tension between emancipatory possibilities of citizenship and citizenship as an institution of domination. He has extensively written, spoken, and taught on performativity, enactments and movements that emancipate peoples and on how cities, states, and empires accumulate subject peoples by dispossession, colonisation, and assimilation.

The chair

Anna Finiguerra chair the seminar.

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