Public lecture: Planetary movements: sovereignty, climate, and belonging
27 October 1500-1700
To register, click HERE.
This lecture explores the planetary condition characterised by climate change, genocidal wars, orbital and superscale data processing centres, interplanetary communication networks, and the inadequate or ineffective responses of national and international organisations. However, numerous social movements have broadened their scope and organisation to address these challenges and are developing new political practices termed ‘planetary movements’. Drawing on Isin’s (2025) analysis, this lecture examines the planetary challenges and investigates emerging promising and effective collective organising methods. These developments are reshaping our understandings of sovereignty and citizenship.
Optional background readingL: Isin, Engin. 2025. ‘Planetary Movements’. In The Oxford Handbook of Cosmopolitanism, edited by Prathama Banerjee, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Sanjay Seth, and Lisa Wedeen. Oxford University Press.
Reading seminar: Performativity, sovereignty, and citizenship
27 October 0930-1130
This seminar will focus on work that draws on performativity theories inaugurated J.L Austin (1962; [1961] 1970), advanced by Jacques Derrida ([1977] 1988) and taken up by especially feminist scholars including, Shoshana Felman ([1980] 2003) and Judith Butler ([1997] 2021). The main contribution of this scholarship is to argue that speech, broadly understood as discourse, is not just interpretive or descriptive but actively creates phenomena. What perceived as merely material phenomena such as gender, race, state, nation, and ethnicity are created by discursive practices like speech, writing, drawing, and acting. The seminar will begin with a discussion of these key tenets.
We will, however, primarily focus on studies that approach sovereignty and citizenship as material phenomena constituted by discursive practices from a performativity perspective. We will discuss articles by Engin Isin (2009; 2017), Bart Klem (2025), Shirin Rai (2017), and Tamara Caraus (2018). Each draw on performativity in different ways but illustrate how sovereignty and citizenship can be studied as performatives. We will also keep (Isin 2024) as a background reference.