Please register by April 28th using the form below.
The manuscript will be shared with registered participants. Short commentaries will be provided by Jacob Blumenfeld, Robin Celikates, Rahel Jaeggi, Lara Knüpffer, and Livia von Samson.
Topic
The radical social movements of the late twentieth century are often understood as anti-statist. But Katrina Forrester argues that they are better characterized as social struggles over the state. On her account, anti-capitalist dissent over social services in 1970s Britain—including struggles over the organization of the family, welfare, housing, public-sector work, and the city—generated an underappreciated body of political theorizing about the state and social movements. From this conjuncture, she identifies what she calls a political theory of struggle in and against the state, alongside a social movement theory of the capitalist state. Taken together, these two strands show how a range of dissenting practices—from squatting to bureaucratic sabotage—can be understood as struggles in and against the state.
Katrina Forrester
Katrina Forrester is the John L. Loeb Associate Professor of the Social Sciences in the Department of Government and Committee on Social Studies at Harvard University. She is a political theorist and historian with interests in the history of liberalism and the left in the postwar US and Britain; theories of work, capitalism, and the state; Marxism, feminism, and psychoanalysis; and climate politics.