Throughout 2023 and 2024, Marie Petersmann, Assistant Professorial Research Fellow at the Law School, and Dimitri Vandermeerssche (QMUL) are hosting a series of events on the theme of ‘Underworlds – Sites and Struggles 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.
More information on the specific sites & struggles that are being discussed can be found here:
oceans, oil / coal, breath, debt, commons, frontier(s), waste, hope, wild / feral, vessels. Talks from this Series will be posted as podcasts soon, so stay tuned. For more on the Series Workshop, to be held in London from 15 to 17 May 2024, see here.