Dr Miri Davidson, BA (Auckland), MA (Goldsmiths), PhD (Queen Mary)

Profile

I work on the history of political thought, with a focus on French theory, Marxist and critical theory, decolonial theory, the politics of the social sciences. My PhD thesis, supervised by Kimberly Hutchings and Alberto Toscano, was titled Anthropology and the crisis of Marxism: The theory and politics of ‘primitive society’ in postwar France. I completed it in 2021 and I have been teaching in SPIR since 2017.

Undergraduate Teaching

POL105 Political Analysis

POL106 Introduction to International Relations

POL109: Global Histories

Research

Research Interests:

History of political thought; Marxism, socialism, and social movements; continental philosophy and critical theory; history of anthropology; anticolonial theory, decolonial theory, indigenous studies.

Examples of research funding:

My PhD research was funded by a QMUL Principal’s Studentship.

Publications

Miri Davidson, ‘The Primitive’, in Beverly Skeggs, Sara R. Farris, Alberto Toscano, and Svenja Bromberg (eds) The SAGE Handbook of Marxism (London: SAGE, 2021).

Simon Barber and Miri Davidson (eds), Through That Which Separates Us (Auckland, NZ: Te Reo Kē, 2020).

Miri Davidson, ‘Speech Work’, Social Text Online, 2019.

Miri Davidson, ‘Anthropology beginning again’, Radical Philosophy 2.03, 2018.

Conference papers

‘Can “the pluriverse” decolonize? The politics of difference and the imperial international’, Millennium Conference, 23 October 2021.

‘Primitivism against Marxism after ’68: Pierre Clastres’, Primitivism Now Workshop, Centre for Philosophy and Critical Theory, Goldsmiths, University of London, 29 October 2019

‘No Gods, No Masters: Pierre Clastres’s Anti-Authoritarian Primitivism’, British International Studies Association Conference, The Royal Society, London, 12-14 June 2019.

Respondent to Lucie Mercier’s paper ‘“Geometry of the Incommunicable”: Serres and Foucault on Spatiality, Territory and Power’, (Dis)placing Space-Time Workshop, Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy (CRMEP), Kingston University London, 23 November 2018.

‘Race as Analogy in the thought of Claude Lévi-Strauss’, Society for European Philosophy Conference, University of Winchester, 4–6 September 2017.

‘Colonialism and the concept of culture in Claude Lévi-Strauss and Aimé Césaire’, Reparative Histories II: The Making, Unmaking and Remaking of ‘Race’, University of Brighton, 6–7 April 2017.

‘Introduction to Claude Lévi-Strauss’, [Again] Philosophy Forum Public Lecture, London, 7 March 2017

Public Engagement

I convened a Melbourne School of Continental Philosophy Winter School 2021 course titled ‘Primitive Communism: The Genealogy of an Idea’. I also recently co-edited a book with Simon Barber (Through That Which Separates Us, 2021) centred around themes of deportation, incarceration, and colonialism in Aotearoa New Zealand, Australia and the Pacific.