MASTER CLASS SERIES 2016/

2017

MASTER CLASS SERIES

2016/ 2017

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The Institute for Social Justice is a creative space for thinking about and responding to the challenges we face in the 21st Century.

We are developing innovative cross-disciplinary and interdisciplinary research programs that will experimentally combine original scholarship and normative reflection with diverse forms of action research. This complex and multi-faceted endeavor requires rethinking our highest social ideals: justice, equality, freedom, democracy, public goods, and the very meaning of

our humanity. It also requires concretely addressing urgent social issues, seeking practical and workable solutions through productive partnerships with academic colleagues locally and internationally, and through engagement with community and civil society organizations.

Altogether distinctive in the Australian context is our Doctoral Program in Social and Political Thought, a four-year program that begins with an intense year of coursework and training, combining serious theoretical and conceptual work with

a strong commitment to engaging with the enormous challenges of our era.

This year, we are offering our coursework to postgraduate students and early career researchers as part of the ISJ Masterclass Series. Participants develop a deeper understanding of the great debates in political and social thought, and the complexities of socially engaged research, and develop original investigations within a strong intellectual community.

Come join our conversation...

WELCOME FROM ISJ

CONTENTS 6 Decolonizing Feminism

7 Possibilities for Radical Political Transformation

9 The Idea of Alternative Modernities

10 Ethnography

11 Critique and Critical Theory

12 Discourse Analysis

13 The Social Thought of Sigmund Freud

14 Masterclass leaders

19 Getting there

19 How to register

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POSSIBILITIES FOR RADICAL POLITICAL TRANSFORMATION

Professor Romand Coles, Institute for Social Justice, ACU

This seminar introduces several vital theories and strategies for generating political transformation in the face of recalcitrant powers and problems. While appreciating the specific contexts in which these visions of change have emerged, we will pay particular attention to their potential uses and limits for creating change today. We will discuss radical democratic modes of broad-based community organizing, nonviolent civil disobedience and uprising,

the political power of moral imagination, dramatic aesthetic practice, internet social networking among diverse constituencies, and the political energy of radical democratic smart-grids. Participants will explore possibilities for full-spectrum organising that draw on several approaches that are often viewed as in conflict with each other. Readings will include selections from Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr., Ella Baker, Saul Alinsky, John Paul Lederach, Arjun Appadurai, Christina Beltran, Manuel Castells, Mark and Paul Engler, and Romand Coles.

NOV 2016

14 – 25 NOV 2016 | WEEKDAYS 12-3PM

Professor Linda Martin Alcoff, Institute for Social Justice, ACU and CUNYProfessor Allison Weir, Institute for Social Justice, ACUDr Kiran Grewal, Institute for Social Justice, ACU

What are the possibilities for an inclusive transnational feminist politics in the 21st century? How can feminists respond to continuing regimes of colonization, racialization, and imperialism, and resist the assumption that western culture provides the model of gender justice? This two-week seminar will explore new approaches to questions of gender justice and gender theory, including Indigenous and Islamic feminisms, postwestern

perspectives, and postsecular, postcolonial, and transnational feminisms. We will discuss and analyze links between gender orders and colonial conquest and settlement, changing patterns of violence against women, and racializing discourses and knowledge regimes, to challenge dominant understandings of knowledge and law, agency and politics. We will also discuss new strategies for solidarity and resistance, including alliances between secular and spiritual feminisms, Indigenous and settler feminisms, and local and transnational movements, to consider ways to build solidarities across differences, and to create genuinely democratic theories and politics of transformation.

DECOLONIZING FEMINISM

SEPT 2016

22 AUG – 2 SEPT | WEEKDAYS 10-1PM

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Professor Rajeev Bhargava, Institute for Social Justice, ACU and CSDS, New DelhiProfessor Akeel Bilgrami, Institute for Social Justice, ACU and Columbia UniversityProfessor Nikolas Kompridis, Institute for Social Justice, ACU

The idea of alternative modernities usefully challenges the widespread view that modernity is uniquely and distinctively western, arising around a set of values such as freedom or equality radically different in form and meaning from values available to humanity in the past. It suggests that there are multiple modernities – Asian, Latin American, other non-western, and even other marginalized European modernities – which can offer a moral challenge to an entrenched, mainstream western modernity. Rajeev Bhargava will explore the idea of alternative modernities with reference to Indian religions and secularisms, and to discussions of

axiality, in particular, an axial moment in the history of the Indian sub-continent. Akeel Bilgrami will explore whether it makes sense to say today that there is a distinct perspective of the South? If so, what conceptual links does it have with dissenting voices in the political and intellectual outlooks of the North — ranging from Marxism and before to post-structuralism and after? Taking this one step further, Nikolas Kompridis will explore the question of whether romanticism represents an alternative (possible) modernity within the west, whose possibilities have been marginalized and misunderstood.

8 - 9 & 12 - 13 DEC 2016 | 10-1PM & 2-5PM

THE IDEA OF ALTERNATIVE MODERNITIES

DEC 2016

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15 - 17 MAR 2017 | 10-1PM

CRITIQUE AND CRITICAL THEORY

Professor Nikolas Kompridis, Institute for Social Justice, ACU In recent years, some probing questions have been raised about the value of critique, particularly in its various “unmasking” forms and strategies. For example, Talal Asad, (“Free Speech, Blasphemy, and Secular Critique),” Bruno Latour (“Has Critique Run out of Steam?”), Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (“Paranoid Reading and

Reparative Reading”), and Michael Warner (“Uncritical Reading”), and, most recently, Rita Felski, The Limits of Critique (2016), have challenged the normative and epistemological assumptions as well as the ethical and political implications of critique as an unmasking practice. Latour provocatively asks whether critique “has run out of steam? … Are we not like those mechanical toys that endlessly make the same gesture when

everything else has changed around them?” This master class will consider these probing challenges, and explore the question of whether historical circumstances call for a different understanding and different practice of critique than that which has guided us, at least since Kant. Would a change in the meaning and practice of critique alter the form and character of “critical theory”?

MAR 2017

FEB 2017

Dr Lia Haro, Institute for Social Justice, ACU

Scholars in myriad disciplines who hunger for human engagement in their scholarship have increasingly adopted ethnography as a mode of knowledge production that is grounded in experiential, embodied, self-reflective and empathetic dwelling with living individuals and communities. Too often, in the absence of

deeper understanding of the history and debates through which ethnography has evolved, many would-be ethnographers reduce the art to a mere “method” interpreted as a loose commitment to “being there,” participant observation and informal interviews. In this masterclass, we will explore a more rigorous understanding and experience of ethnography as much more than a “method”. Instead, we

approach ethnography as both an epistemology— a way of knowing—and an ontology—a way of being. Unlike other forms of knowledge production that claim to “know” the object of inquiry, good ethnography involves being intimately and humbly attuned and receptive to the partial, excessive, contradictory and messy dimensions of life as it is lived, emerges and unfolds betwixt and between humans, non-

humans and the material world. Through readings of classic as well as contemporary theories of ethnography with embodied ethnographic exercises, participants will deepen their understanding both of this unique mode of knowledge production and of their own academic projects.

ETHNOGRAPHY17 & 24 FEB 2017 | 10-3PM

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Freud – these classes will argue – was a social thinker. Our question will be: what does that mean? Famous for his controversial views on sexuality, Freud is less known for his equally challenging engagement with war, ethics, group identity and faith. During these four classes our in-depth focus will be on: `Thoughts for the Time on War and Death,’ `Mass Psychology and the Analysis of the “I”, Civilisation and its Discontents, Moses and Monotheism, with ample opportunity to digress, or rather follow the path they offer, into some of the most intractable dilemmas of the modern world.

MAY 2017

Dr Magdalena Zolkos, Institute for Social Justice, ACUDr Kiran Grewal, Institute for Social Justice, ACUDr Naser Ghobadzadeh, Institute for Social Justice, ACU

26 - 28 APRIL 2017 | 10-1PM

29 - 30 MAY 2017

10-1PM & 2-5PM

DISCOURSE ANALYSIS

This masterclass offers an introduction to the concept, theory and practice of discourse analysis. While discourse analysis is a heterogenous field of theorising and analysing semiotic events, its common thread is the assumption that socio-political relations of power, inequality and dominance are both reproduced and resisted textually. This masterclass aims to introduce participants to the concept and theory

of discourse analysis found in the work of Michel Foucault, as well as Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, and scholars working in the tradition of Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) - Norman Fairclough, Teun A. van Dijk, and others. It also includes a segment on the methodology of discourse analysis, offering practical exercises that teach skills to enable the participants to incorporate CDA in their postgraduate research. 

APR 2017

THE SOCIAL THOUGHT OF SIGMUND FREUD

Professor Jacqueline Rose, Institute for Social Justice, ACU and Institute for the Humanities, Birkbeck College

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Linda Martín Alcoff joined the Institute for Social Justice as a Professorial Fellow in 2015. She is Professor of Philosophy at Hunter College CUNY. She was President of the American Philosophical Association, Eastern Division, for 2012-2013, and has also served on its Executive Committee, Nominating Committee, Program Committee, Committee on the Status of Women, and as Chair of the Committee on Hispanics/Latinos. She also served as Co- Director of SPEP (the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy) from 1997-1999.

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Linda MartÍn AlcoffProfessorial Fellow Institute for Social Justice

MASTERCLASS LEADERS

Nikolas Kompridis is Research Professor in Philosophy and Political Thought and Director of the Institute for Social Justice. Originally trained as a musician, after a decade long career in music he was drawn into an academic career, inspired by the Critical Theory tradition. He is the author of The Aesthetic Turn in Political Thought (Bloomsbury, 2014) Critique and Disclosure: Critical Theory between Past and Future (MIT, 2006), Philosophical Romanticism (Routledge, 2006).

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Nikolas KompridisResearch Professor and Director Institute for Social Justice

Allison Weir is a social and political philosopher. Her work focuses on intersections of gender, sexuality, class, ethnicity, “race”, and religion in the development of individual and collective identities, and on the relation of identity to agency and freedom, power and solidarity. Her work is interdisciplinary, in the areas of feminist theory, queer theory, critical theory, critical race theory, poststructuralism, postcolonial theory, 19th and 20th century continental philosophy, and history of philosophy.

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Allison WeirResearch Professor Institute for Social Justice

Magdalena Zolkos is a political theorist specializing in the fields of memory politics; historical justice and reconciliation; cultural and psychoanalytic trauma theory; emotions and affect; contemporary democratic theory; and feminist theory. She is interested in how the legacy of historical trauma affects the trajectories of democratic transition and consolidation, conditions the play of affective politics, and inspires, though at times also constrains, practices of emancipatory politics and resistance.

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Magdalena ZolkosSenior Research Fellow Institute for Social Justice

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MASTERCLASS LEADERS

Kiran Grewal works in the areas of international human rights, criminal justice and social activism. Her current research focuses on the relationship between international law and grassroots social justice struggles in post-conflict settings. She is also involved as an activist researcher in a project exploring the possibilities for alternative models of critically reflexive activism in Sri Lanka. Her publications include The Socio-Political Practice of Human Rights: Between the Universal and the Particular (2016).

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Professor Jacqueline Rose joined the Institute for Social Justice as a Professorial Fellow in 2016 and is currently Professor of Humanities at Birkbeck College. Jacqueline Rose is internationally known for her writing on feminism, psychoanalysis, literature, and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Her books include Sexuality in the Field of Vision (1986), The Haunting of Sylvia Plath (1991), States of Fantasy (1996), The Question of Zion (2005), The Last Resistance (2007), Proust Among the Nations – from Dreyfus to the Middle East (2012), Women in Dark Times (2014) and the novel Albertine (2001).

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A cultural anthropologist and social theorist, Haro joined the Institute for Social Justice in January of 2016. Her work focuses on utopian social imagination and practices of constructing possible futures in present communities and contexts of social transformation. She contends that the tendency to interpret “utopia” as synonymous with naiveté and unrealistic dreams obscures how collective dreams of radically better futures, both from above (state and international institutions) and from below (grassroots social movements and communities), shape everyday lives, social relationships, present actions and cultural formations.

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Researching at the intersection of religion and politics, Naser Ghobadzadeh’s interests lie in the study of Islamic political theology, secularism, state-religion-society relations, and Middle East and Iranian politics. By mapping competing discourses and practices in the Muslim world, his current research project involves conceptualising the possibility not only of the co-existence of religious and secularity but also the need to recognise the religious roots of an emerging model of secularity in the Muslim world.

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Kiran GrewalSenior Research Fellow Institute for Social Justice

Jacqueline RoseProfessorial Fellow Institute for Social Justice

Lia HaroResearch Fellow Institute for Social Justice

Naser GhobadzadehResearch Fellow Institute for Social Justice

Rajeev BhargavaProfessorial Fellow Institute for Social Justice

Professor Akeel Bilgrami joined the Institute for Social Justice (ACU) as a Professorial Fellow in 2015 and is currently the Sidney Morgenbesser Professor of Philosophy at Columbia University. Professor Bilgrami has two relatively independent sets of intellectual interests: in the Philosophy of Mind and Language, and in Political Philosophy and Moral Psychology especially as they surface in politics, history, and culture. His book of selected essays on the moral psychology of politics entitled Secularism, Identity, and Enchantment was published by HUP in 2014.

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Romand Coles is a scholar-activist who works at the intersections of critical philosophy, radical democratic theory, environmental justice, and various modes of political organizing and activism. Before coming to the Institute for Social Justice, he served as the McAllister Endowed Chair and Director of the Program for Community, Culture, and Environment at Northern Arizona University. During the two decades prior to that, he taught political theory and engaged in radical democratic political organizing at Duke University.

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Akeel BilgramiProfessorial Fellow Institute for Social Justice

Romand ColesResearch Professor Institute for Social Justice

Professor Rajeev Bhargava joined the Institute for Social Justice as a Professorial Fellow in 2014 and is currently Professor at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies (CSDS), New Delhi. Bhargava’s work on secularism and methodological individualism is internationally acclaimed. He has been with the CSDS since 2005, was its Director from 2007-2014, and is now Director of its recently launched Institute of Indian Thought. His publications include Individualism in Social Science (1992), What is Political Theory and Why Do We Need It? (2010), and The Promise of India’s Secular Democracy (2010).

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Institute for Social Justice Level 2, 7 Mount Street, North Sydney NSW 2060

The Institute for Social Justice is located on the ACU’s North Sydney campus, close to the northern of Sydney’s magnificent Harbour Bridge. Participants can best travel to North Sydney on public transport, as there is limited car parking available.

The most effective mode of transport is by train. Trains depart from Town Hall Station and/or Wynyard Station regularly on the red coloured Northern Line, leaving from Platform 3.

Buses and ferries to North Sydney are also available. Our nearest bus stop is Pacific Hwy near Berry St.

For all transport timetables and info on the travel options from your starting location, the following website is helpful: www.transportnsw.info

GETTING THERE& HOW TO REGISTER

How to register

All our Masterclasses are offered free of charge but require registration which you can find on our website www.isj.acu.edu.au

Once you have registered we will keep you informed on readings suggested for the individual class.

To keep up with our conversation and other public research activities follow us on Facebook @instituteforsocialjustice

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isj.acu.edu.au

E isj@acu.edu.auP +61 (02) 9739 2789 instituteforsocialjustice