Engagement with practices of global ordering is often guided towards specific locations and legacies: the sovereign state, the formal sources and standards of international law, the intricacies of global diplomacy, the historical juncture and its (anti-)heroes, the international palaces of hope in Geneva, New York, or The Hague. These explorations entail ideas of where power resides and where it is to be unmasked or undone – ideas implicitly grounded in modernist geographies, temporalities, and subjectivities. Starting from the limits of these familiar perspectives, this lecture and workshop series traces the multiple ways in which these sites, actors, and events are cabined, crossed, and cut apart by alternative material arteries, lineages, and languages of global dis/ordering.
The series takes as starting point that authority and order are not fixed properties of specific actors or institutions, but the result of ongoing material processes of ordering and world-making. As such, it traces unconventional forms and sites of global dis/ordering – from raw materials to projections of hope – as material, infrastructural, and discursive compositions that shape patterns of power. The encounter between old- and new materialist, Marxist and decolonial methodologies and modes of critique is one of the key objectives of this series. Its aim, however, is not only methodological: it aspires to inspire new ethical and political openings that attend to our inevitable complicity in taking part in these processes, and reveal new modes of resistance and refusal, of struggle and sociality. These interventions are not narrowly targeted at the old nemeses of critique – the state, the truth, the universal – but work from within both entrenched and emergent material sites and practices of dis/ordering: oceans, oil, coal, breath, debt, commons, frontier(s), waste, hope, wild, wild / vessels.
Photo: © Jelena Luise. Sound Fossil, 2022, sound blown glass, unique. © Dominique Koch & Tobias Koch.
The series is convened by Marie Petersmann and Dimitri Van Den Meerssche and co-organized by QMUL the Institute for Humanities and Social Sciences and the Centre for Law and Society in a Global Context and the LSE School of Law.
The co-convenors invite abstracts of papers or projects that take the theme of underworlds onto new terrains and in different directions.
The abstracts of no more than 500 words should be submitted by 12 January 2024. You will be notified of our decision by 26 January 2024.
Please send your abstracts to m.petersmann@lse.ac.uk and d.vandenmeerssche@qmul.ac.uk.
The authors of selected abstracts will be invited to a workshop / conference / gathering in London on 15-17 May 2024.
Please read the Call for Papers: Underworlds – Sites and Struggles of Global Dis/Ordering [PDF 213KB] for more information.
All events take place online at 14.00 BST.
Please register by clicking on the links below.
Oceans (with Renisa Mawani and Surabhi Ranganathan) – 11 October 2023Oil / Coal (with Lys Kulamadayil and On Barak) – 25 October 2023Breath (with Daniela Gandorfer and Jean-Thomas Tremblay) – 22 November 2023Debt (with Vasuki Nesiah and Kojo Koram) – 13 December 2023Commons (with Isabel Feichtner and Elsa Noterman) – 24 January 2024Frontier(s) (with Christine Schwöbel-Patel and Cait Storr) – 28 February 2024Waste (with Heather Davis and Michael Hennessy Picard) – 27 March 2024Hope (with Claire Colebrook and David Chandler) – 24 April 2024Wild / Feral (with Irus Braverman and Floris De Witte) – 29 May 2024Vessels (with Rinaldo Walcott and Itamar Mann) – 19 June 2024