The Northwestern Graduate Student Political Theory Conference is a biennial conference that invites graduate students and a keynote speaker to convene with the Northwestern political theory community around a given theme. Details of past conferences can be found here. The call for papers for this conference can be found here.
To register for the conference, please fill out this form.
The Politics of Worldmaking
November 10–11, 2022, Scott Hall, Room 212
To think politically about and within “the world” is to call upon something shared in common across human and non-human life, and upon the meaning and content of political existence. An orientation toward the world considers the conditions necessary for freedom and for the staging of public appearance, while contending with the multiple ways in which the apparatuses that sustain public life emerge, flourish, decline, or must be reimagined. Worldmaking transgresses borders and boundaries of nation-state, East–West, metropole–periphery, etc., thinking in terms of flows, across territories, beyond regions, and through ecosystems animated by non-human agencies. Yet worldmaking, when linked to the brutal construction and reproduction of global structures of domination, also requires critique, diagnosis, and attention to figures of the newly thinkable, to alternative projects and wild fabulations.
This conference invites graduate students to submit papers engaging the possibilities and limitations of theorizing worldmaking, worldbuilding, or worlding. What political visions and practices are illuminated—or perhaps obscured—when we center the “world” in political theory? And what struggles, perplexities, crises, or catastrophes precipitate a turn to the “world” in political theory—or, alternatively, to a reinvention or withdrawal from it?
Thursday, November 10
12pm: Welcome and lunch
1pm: Beginnings
- “Surrogacy as Struggle: Culture, Contradiction, and Ideology in Canada”
Alexandria Hammond, McGill University - “In the Whirlwind or the Storm: A Theorist of Black Death”
Carol-Armelle Ze-Noah, UC Berkeley - “Thinking Between Past and Future: Arendt on History and Storytelling”
Madalyn Hay, University of Toronto
Chair: Mary G. Dietz
Discussant: Tim Charlebois
3pm: Worldmaking and Normativity
- “The Lifeworld and Its Digital Reproduction”
Atticus Carnell, Princeton University - “The Legitimacy of Resentment”
Robert Spadidakis, McGill University - “Worldmaking in Batholomé de las Casas’ Theory of Human Rights”
Logan Gates, University of Toronto
Chair: Shmulik Nili
Discussant: Nathalia Justo
5pm: Keynote: “Democracy, Worldbuilding, and the Limits of Sovereign Mastery”
Anna Jurkevics, University of British Columbia
6:30pm: Reception
Friday, November 11
10am: Bounding and Bordering the World
- “The Global Plantation in the Political Thought of Lloyd Best and George Beckford”
Alexia Akaldi-Barbaro, Cornell University - “Oceanic Democracy: Towards a Planetary Politics of Democracy”
Isaac Stethem, Columbia University - “Against Borders”
Maeve Botham, McGill University
Chair: Ian Hurd
Discussant: Owen Brown
12pm: Lunch
1pm: Alternative Worlds
- “Utopias as Future Histories: Exploring the Worldbuilding of The Ministry for the Future“
Adam Goldsmith, Northwestern University - “A Case for Black Mysticism in Studies of Black Power Era Political Theory”
Zaria Sawdijah El-Fil, University of Chicago - “Rancière Against ‘World'”
Gregory Convertito, DePaul University
Chair: Jim Farr
Discussant: Amanda Fu
3pm: Revolution
- “The Postcolonial Politician’s World: Political Founding After Anticolonialism”
Yi Ning Chang, Harvard University - “Returning to Mao? Historical Experience After Revolution”
Yiwen Huang, UC Irvine - “Fear of a Black Commune: Luiz Gama and Plebeian Internationalism”
Niklas Plätzer, University of Chicago
Chair: Loubna El Amine
Discussant: Jinxue Chen
6pm: Dinner