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The reading group is open to Mphil/PhD students of all disciplines and meets fortnightly to discuss the work of Jacques Derrida. We focus on one text each meeting with the discussion usually lasting for a couple of hours. The group aims to provide a forum for discussing a range of responses to Derrida's work, particularly in relation to questions of law and justice. We aim to read as broad a range of Derrida's texts as we can and are not limited to those that explicitly engage with the law. The meetings provide a useful space to present and discuss work in progress or to simply share in the bemused head-scratching that reading Derrida often engenders.
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For more information please contact Dan Matthews:
dcmmatthews@hotmail.com
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Peter Fitzpatrick organises a fortnightly discussion group on Law and Social Theory for PhD students.
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This tends to concentrate on key texts, but it also provides a forum for students to present their own work-in-progress. Visiting scholars and speakers are often involved in the work of the group.
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He also organises a texts group in which speakers engage with and lead a discussion of a text that is of particular significance to them.
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If you have a specific interest in the topic of a particular reading and would like to attend, please contact
Peter Fitzpatrick.
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The aim of this group is to engage with different forms of expression and reflection from and about the so-called ‘Global South’. Let us call this the ‘voice’ of the global South; a voice, and nothing more.
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It comprises cinema, literature, music and/or philosophy, but also the positing of the South as an ‘object’ of scientific study and developmental strategies of all sorts. The standpoint towards the history and culture of the South is not that of the ambivalence and otherness of the self. Unburdened from any self-conscious political correctness about the alleged naiveté of binary conceptions of law and history (victors/vanquished, north/south, victims/rescuers) we hope to be able to focus on the more important considerations facing a rigorous engagement with and conception of the times we live in.
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First, we propose the need to pursue the fundamentally dissimilar standpoints of the north and the south, the colonisers and the colonised, the rescuers and the victims.
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Second, this task is enabled by a concentrated focus on the fact that, in spite of the relentless logic of progress and modernization, there are ‘things’ that have escaped the self-revolutionising, forward march of progress.
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We emphasise the way in which the ordinary ideology of our times denies the existence of such things, such a voice, such a standpoint, and thus, concentrate on its determinations, which are not subject to assimilation under an exclusively linguistic order, which they resist almost as much as the apparently opposite but in fact supplementary idea that there is no truth but just ‘regimes of phrases’. These literatures, theoretical constructs and artefacts signal their stance against a world that seeks to appropriate them as eccentric, inert, impotent, a surplus (surplus life, surplus populations, surplus labour, surplus or archaic objectivity), and/or in need of moral and educative trusteeship.
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The group meets once a month. For further information contact
Oscar Guardiola-Rivera.
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This reading group, meeting every three weeks, has been engaging, for more than a year now, with key texts exploring what has been broadly defined 'Spatial Turn' within Social Sciences. Examples of that include Henri Lefebvre, David Harvey, Doreen Massey, Nicholas Blomley.
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If you would like to attend, please contact
Paola Pasquali
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The idea is to kick start a reading/research group that will meet twice a month or so, to discuss a particular reading. The theme for this year, until December 2011 is The Control of Movement. From December 2011 on the theme will be set through discussion and agreement with participants.
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The theme of Control of Movement aims to cover readings on the following matters: Immigration Laws & Policies; Migration Studies; Asylum Laws & Policies;Movement Controls more generally affecting citizens as well as denizens (for example ASBOs in the UK, etc.); Theory Papers of direct or indirect relevance (on notions of Community, rights, politics etc.). All welcome.
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For more information please contact
Thanos Zartloudis.
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The Work in Progress Group (WiPG) is an informal meeting of postgraduate students and faculty members which gathers to listen to postgraduate students present material that they are currently working on. The aim of the group is to discuss and critique new ideas in a friendly, supportive, yet (constructively) critical environment in which postgraduate students can learn from their peers and members of faculty.
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The WiPG meets on an irregular basis, dependent largely on what material students are working on and what they feel like presenting to the group. The group is open to any interested postgraduate students from the Law School at Birkbeck who wish to present their work, and also to any other postgraduate students from other institutions who wish to participate (whether that be through attending the WiPG or through presenting material themselves).
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Anyone interested in presenting to the WiPG, or in being informed of upcoming presentations, should contact Ben Golder at:
benjgolder@hotmail.com
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This reading group will focus at first on the book, Who Sings the Nation-state?(2007), co-authored by Judith Butler and Gayatri Spivak, recording a series of conversations that Butler and Spivak had over a period around the themes of citizenship, the state, speech, the national anthem, religion, capital (amongst a few), and the north-south divide. Central to their conversation are the work of Habermas, Arendt, Derrida, Marx and Agamben.
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A copy of the readings can be found in 16 Gower Street in the conversations file to be photocopied by those that want to participate. These are: Arendt, H. (1985) 'The decline of the Nation-State and the End of the Rights of Man' from
The Origins of Totalitarianism Hancourt In: San Diego New York; and Agamben, G.
We Refugees available at
http://www.egs.edu/faculty/agamben/agamben-we-refugees.html.
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For further information contact Elena Loizidou.
