Dieses Event ist leider schon vorbei!
Am 4. August wird es von uns zu dem Thema aber auch einen Workshop bei THERE IS NO SPACE in Hamburg geben. Mehr Informationen dazu hier.

Gender, Race, and Property

Ein Symposium der HUG. Mit Brenna Bhandar (SOAS London), Isabell Lorey (Academy of Media Arts Cologne), Eva von Redecker (Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin) und Adriana Zaharijević (University of Belgrade, University of Novi Sad).

„…yet every Man has a Property in his own Person. This no Body has any Right to but himself“ (Locke, 1689) –  This concept of the individual as the owner of their person and labor power, as described in 17th/18th century liberal philosophy and throughout the philosophy of Enlightenment, has become common sense in Western societies. While the idea of the sovereign subject posits universality, it emerged under historical conditions of colonial dispossession and appropriation of bodies, land, and means of production. In the course of these processes, people gendered as women as well as black people, indigenous people, and people of color were dispossessed and propertized in different ways. The categories of race and gender as they are dominantly understood today bear traces of these violent genealogies.

What does it mean to understand race and gender as effects of dispossession, propertization, and appropriation? What role have economic and legal mechanisms such as property, dispossession, and debt played in the historical development of racism and sexism in Western societies? And finally, what can be gained from these theoretical debates for today’s feminist, antiracist, and anticapitalist struggles?

In the interest of addressing such questions, the student initiative for feminist philosophy at HU Berlin invites you to the symposium Gender, Race, and Property. We want to discuss the importance of the legal form of property for the formation of race and gender as social relations and forms of oppression, specifically as they pertain to contexts of current social movements. On Friday evening (May 17th), we begin with an opening panel with Brenna Bhandar, Isabell Lorey, Eva von Redecker, and Adriana Zaharijević on how the modern form of property has shaped white supremacy and patriarchy. On Saturday (May 18th), we continue with an all-day workshop where we discuss works of all four speakers and draw connections between their theoretical approaches. For more information on the workshop read here. Please sign up for the workshop via agfemphil@hu-berlin.de. We will send you the preparatory readings (optional) upon registration.

 

Speakers

Brenna Bhandar is a Senior Lecturer in Law at SOAS, University of London. In her book Colonial Lives of Property: Law, Land, and Racial Regimes of Ownership (2018), she explores the relationship between racial formations and modern property law in settler colonial contexts. In particular, she examines the articulations of race and ownership that emerge through the appropriation of indigenous lands.

Eva von Redecker is deputy director of the Berlin Center for Humanities and Social Change and a postdoc researcher at the chair for Social Philosophy at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. In 2018, she published her monograph Praxis und Revolution: Eine Sozialtheorie radikalen Wandels. Her current research focuses on the notion of propertization in order to understand the way in which modern forms of domination and violence hinge on the logics of ownership.

Adriana Zaharijević is a senior research fellow at the Institute for Philosophy and Social Theory at the University of Belgrade and an assistant professor in gender studies at the University of Novi Sad. She has authored two books, Postajanje ženom [Becoming Woman] (2010) and Ko je pojedinac? [Who is an Individual? Genealogical Inquiry into the Idea of a Citizen] (2014). At the moment, she is writing a comprehensive introduction into the political philosophy of Judith Butler, focusing on agency, livability, and non-violence. As a point of departure, she draws on feminist approaches to suggest a post-sovereign, ‚dispossessed‘ form of subjectivity.

Isabell Lorey is a professor for Queer Studies in Arts and Science at the Academy of Media Arts Cologne. In her book State of Insecurity: Government of the Precarious (Verso 2015; orig.: Die Regierung der Prekären (2012)), she focuses on the precarization of life and labour in neoliberalism. Her recent work examines new radical democratic practices emerging from social movements, and she has just finished a book on „Presentist Democracy“.

 

         


May 17th – 19th

We offer childcare on site, please let us know by May 10th if you would like to use it


Friday, May 17th 

6.30 pm
PANEL DISCUSSION
Biergarten Jockel
Ratiborstr. 14c
10999 Berlin

No registration needed


Saturday, May 18th

9.15 am to 6.00 pm
WORKSHOP
Aquarium im Südblock
Skalitzer Str. 6
10999 Berlin

9.15 am – 10.45 am
Modes of Abstraction: Race and Property
Input by Brenna Bhandar, comment by Eva von Redecker

11.15 am – 12.45 pm
Ownership’s Shadow: Authoritarianism as Defense of Phantom-Possession
Input by Eva von Redecker, comment by Adriana Zaharijević

2.00 pm – 3.30 pm
Who is ever in property of oneself?
Input by Adriana Zaharijević, comment by Isabell Lorey

4.00 pm – 5.30 pm
Precariousness, Race, and (Queer) Debt
Input by Isabell Lorey, comment by Brenna Bhandar

5.30 pm – 6.00 pm
Concluding Discussion

More information on the panels here

Please register via agfemphil@hu-berlin.de


Sunday, May 19th

11.00 am to 1.00 pm
CLOSING EVENT

Only for the participants of the workshop