Skip to main content
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)

Mobile People Events Series

Join Professor Engin Isin (Queen Mary University of London) who will lead a discussion on dichotomies of activism 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 actions ranging from submission to disobedience.

Professor Engin Isin will discuss recent books Erin Pineda's 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

Janina Pescinski will chair the seminar.

About Mobile People

This event forms part of the Mobile People programme of work. It is a Leverhulme Trust Doctoral Scholarship programme at Queen Mary University of London, Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences and School of Politics and International Relations. For more information please visit IHSS Ongoing projects page. 

 

Back to top