Neoliberal and neofascistic tendencies and the obstacles they present for dissent and mobilization
Lecture series „Critical Diversity and Gender Studies in the 21st Century“
As part of the "Audre Lorde-BUA-Guest Professorship for Intersectional Diversity Studies" of the Diversity and Gender Equality Network DiGENet, the educationalist and gender researcher Professor Maisha M. Auma will critically examine topics around diversity in academic institutions, inclusion and intersectionality from transnational perspectives this winter semester.
Institutional Barriers: Neoliberal and neofascistic tendencies and the obstacles they present for dissent and mobilization. Vulnerability in Resistance Higher Education
Prof. Zeynep Gambetti (requested)
Chair: Prof. Maisha M. Auma
The lecture series will take place online via Zoom. The lectures will be held in English with DGS interpretation: https://tu-berlin.zoom.us/j/63884549808?pwd=VURlRDJpTXJJNXl4N1ZMdU9ISmxlZz09
In cooperation with the Berlin Center for Global Engagement (BCGE)
Abstract
Today’s Far Right as well as neoconservative ideologues are hijacking “the right to difference,” a right that is recognized in the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. By politicizing the neoliberal doctrine of the “equal right to inequality,” dominant discourses across the globe are paradoxically reconfiguring pressures towards conformity. The aim is to achieve sameness without recourse to Leviathan. In many parts of the world, direct governmental action against dissent seems to be replaced by the impersonal power of marketization, demanding active but uncritical adjustments by citizens. The tyranny of the majority is exercised by the statistical curve, whose lower end spells social death, as well as by the rhetoric of security that constructs the Other as the public enemy.
Given this context, how should we conceive of diversity at the university as well as beyond it? How does critical theory fare in revalorizing difference in the face of the economic and political appeal of identitarianism? Are the concepts of “co-existence” and “recognition” effective in addressing the anxieties produced by the neoliberal destruction of social guarantees? If not, can alternatives be constructed to practices that simultaneously standardize and divide us?