Distinguished International Visitor 2023: Professor Elizabeth Povinelli

We are very pleased to confirm our Distinguished International Visitor for academic year 2022-23 will be Elizabeth Povinelli, Franz Boas Professor of Anthropology at Columbia University.  Povinelli is one of the most exciting critical theorists of our times.  She is the author of numerous books that develop an incomparable critique of late liberalism and settler colonialism [e.g. Empire of Love (2006) and  Economies of Abandonment(2011),  Geoontologies (2016), and Between Gaia and Ground (2021)]. She has also worked on six films with the Karrabing Film Collective.  Povinelli is a brilliant and generous scholar. It will be a real pleasure to host her in the department from 13-14 March 2023 for the following events:

Monday 13 March

15:00-16:30 Seminar: Semiotics after Geontopower

***  ROOM TLC101  ***

This seminar discusses the decolonizing potentials and limits to developing a semiotics of agency, intentionality, and mind across human and more-than-human existence that goes beyond the geontological division between Life and Nonlife. The seminar asks both whether a Nonlife semiotics could be constructed and why one might hesitate constructing such a semiotics if one is interested in decolonizing forms of knowledge, truth and justification. 

Tuesday 14 March

10am-12pm - Workshop with PhD students

***  ROOM W309  ***

We will convene a workshop that offers an exploratory overview of Povinelli's work and provokes a discussion around the evolution of one's research, ideas, and contributions over their career. To do so, we as a committee are each selecting a key chapter from Elizabeth Povinelli's bibliography to form a 'collection' that will be shared with the rest of the postgraduate community. Our idea is that this collection will be used to guide a critical discussion with Povinelli around a TBD theme during the workshop. The expectation is not that postgrads will be expected to read every piece of literature (although they can if they want) but rather provide them with a variety of insights and approaches as defined in Povinelli's different texts.