Rethinking the Political: Narrative, Protest and Fiction in the 21st Century

Recordings of the keynote presentations and round table from the conference, Rethinking the Political, held in Brighton 9th-11th September 2024.

Keynote Speakers: Professor Moya Lloyd; Professor Alan Finlayson; Dr German Primera

German Primera Villamizar: Colonial Biopolitics and the Arc of Refusal: rethinking grammars of resistance

German Primera lectures Philosophy and Politics at the University of Brighton. He serves as the deputy director of the Centre for Applied Philosophy, Politics, and Ethics (CAPPE) and is an editor for the journals  Contemporary Political Theory (CPT) and the  Journal of Italian Philosophy. His research focuses on French and Italian contemporary philosophy and thought, Black studies, and Biopolitics. He probes the limits of political theories that deny their implication in histories of coloniality and racism, while reworking theories of relational ontology. His book The political Ontology of Giorgio Agamben  interrogates the relation between political ontology and violence. He is collaborating with Mark Devenney on a forthcoming book titled Troubling Democracy: On Practices of Care, Fugitivity, and Refusal. In this lecture he rethinks biopolitics in light of coloniality.

Moya Lloyd: Radical corporeal politics: Flesh as a locus of political struggle

Moya Lloyd is Professor of Politics in the Department of Government, University of Essex. Her research focuses on the politics of the body, gender, radical democracy, the human/human rights, vulnerability, and questions of agency and resistance, particularly in respect of marginalized or precaritized populations. Her many publications include articles in Hypatia, Theory, Culture and Society, Contemporary Political Theory, the Women’s Philosophy Review, Economy and Society, Constellations alongside seven books. In this lecture she shows how specific forms of corporeal politics challenge theories that ground political action in speech and language.

Alan Finlayson: A Hero’s Journey? Ideological Entrepreneurs and Reactionary Digital Politics

Alan Finlayson is Professor of Politics at the University of East Anglia. His research combines contributions to the development of democratic political and cultural theory with the theoretical,  historical and interpretive analyses of the ideologies that shape political culture, political economy and ‘governmentality’. He has particular expertise in the theoretical and practical study of rhetoric, having developed “Rhetorical Political Analysis” which he has applied variously to the study of policy, political performance and protest songs. He is currently co-authoring a book which analyses the rhetoric and ideology of ‘Reactionary Digital Politics’.. He has published widely in political and social thought, including in Political Studies, Soundings, and Theory, Culture and Society. In this lecture he will discuss how digital platforms and their uses are changing how we encounter and experience politics, in ways which are advantageous to conservative, right-wing and far-right politics.