Critical Perspectives: An Interdisciplinary Reading Group

Tue, 06 Oct 2015 02:00:00 BST

Are you interested in theoretical, critical and philosophical perspectives? In partnership with The University of Cumbria’s Interdisciplinary Reading Group (Dr Tom Grimwood) the group will explore key texts which have made a significant contribution to knowledge by broadening, deepening and complicating our interpretations of social, cultural, political and economic landscapes.

Areas of interest include but are not limited to:

Abuse, activism, alienation, authenticity, capitalism, citizenship, class, community, commodification, conflict, consumption, culture, death, dialectics, dialogics, discourse, deconstruction, democracy, desire, dialogue, difference, dominance, ecology, economics, education, empowerment,  ethnicity, equality, exploitation, family,  feminism, gender, globalization, habitus, hegemony, hermeneutics, hope, identity, ideology, individualism, inequality, intimacy, insurgency, justice, kinship, leadership, legitimacy, media, melancholia, modernity, mourning, narratives, nostalgia, objectivity, occupations, oppression, pedagogy, pleasure, postcolonialism, poststructuralism, postmodernism, politics, poverty, power, privilege, psychoanalysis, queer theory, racialisation, radicalism, resistance, selfhood, semiotics, sexuality, subjectivity, subversion, testimony, theology, trafficking, transformation, trauma, truth, interpersonal violence, state violence, war.

October's book:

The session will be based on Franco Berardi's latest book, Heroes: Mass Murder and Suicide

Berardi's work is grounded in a theory of "semiocapitalism", which argues for the relationship between language and poetry to neoliberalism and political domination; intersecting with the work of thinkers like Baudrillard, Deleuze, Marx, and Foucault.

What is the relationship between capitalism and mental health? In his most unsettling book to date, Franco “Bifo” Berardi embarks on an exhilarating journey through philosophy [...] and current events, searching for the social roots of the mental malaise of our age. Spanning an array of horrors – the Aurora “Joker” killer; Anders Breivik; American school massacres; the suicide epidemic in Korea and Japan; and the recent spate of “austerity” suicides in Europe – Heroes dares to explore the darkest shadow cast by the contemporary obsession with relentless competition and hyper-connectivity. In a volume that crowns four decades of radical intellectual work, Berardi [...] proposes dystopian irony as a strategy to disentangle ourselves from the deadly embrace of absolute capitalism.

Please send expressions of interest to Stephen at s.p.gibbs@hud.ac.uk

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