Archive

The workshop series, organized by the Institute for the Humanities and led by Roberto Longoni and Rogelio Regalado, was open to graduate students, faculty, and members of the public.

Abstract

The main intention of this workshop is to open a space for dialogue and critical reflection on some social phenomena that we understand as an expression of the deep crisis that neoliberal capitalism has been going through since at least 2008. This, of course, does not mean that before 2008 neoliberal capitalism was in a state of harmony and absence of crisis. Expressions of rage and discontent such as the Zapatista uprising in 1994, the Battle of Seattle in 1999 or Genoa in 2001, can be interpreted as evident signs of the instability of the dynamics of financialization and indebtedness that capitalism has had to assume more broadly since the late 1970s in order to sustain its logic of valorization. However, the year 2008 is emblematic in this sense, since, hand in hand with the collapse of the banks and the great stock market centers, various signs of resistance and rebellion sprouted with force throughout the world, which to this day are recognizable by their power, creativity, contradictions and heterogeneity.

In this regard, a wide range of analyses and interpretations have been established, which have mainly focused on understanding the struggles from a normative and liberal point of view, an issue with which we profoundly differ and which we are interested in discussing. Above all, because we sense that the tensions and complexities inherent to these struggles cannot be reduced to the framework of interpretation of democratic liberalism. Our argument in this regard (which of course we also open to discussion) is that the signs of resistance and rebellion that have emerged and have been maintained in the era of neoliberal capitalism are an expression of a crisis of its own foundations, that is, of the form of social relations determined by the value that sustains it.

Specifically, we propose to dialogue and reflect on three phenomena that seem to us important and current, not only to be thought in their geographical and historical specificity, but also to be thought from the concerns that may arise from the context of crisis and resistance in Canada: the fascist advance in global terms, with emphasis on the Mexican case, and the possibility of an anti-fascist resistance; the Chilean revolt of 2019 and its relation to a historical constellation in which the tension between fascism and socialism persists; and the actuality of the Zapatista struggle and the challenges that emanate from it around the possibility of thinking “other” ways of resisting and building a non-hegemonic and truly inclusive globalization.

Sessions

Mar 10: "Capitalism and the Global Fascist Advance: Theoretical Elements and the Mexican Case"
Mar 17: "The 2019 Chilean Revolt and the Specter of Fascism/Communism"
Mar 24: "Zapatista struggle and the Challenge of a Non-hegemonic Globalization"
Mar 31: "A Presentation on the Research Conducted at the Instituto de Ciencias Sociales y Humanidades - BUAP"

Detailed Schedule

"Crisis of Neoliberal Capitalism and Resistance in Latin America".pdf

Come for Trivia Night and earn prizes! Open to everyone. Free pizza and snacks provided. Brought to you by the Humanities Graduate Student Caucus and Humanities Student Union.

The workshop, organized by the Institute for the Humanities and led by Newton Duarte, was open to graduate students, faculty, and members of the public.

Abstract

Obscurantism has been assuming increasingly-aggressive forms in many countries in which political leaders are elected by spreading discourses that outright attack several social groups, including scientists, teachers, artists, and journalists. In my country, Brazil, right-wing political leaders claim that the regime that ran in the country from 1964 to 1985 was not a dictatorship and there was no censorship, torture, and murder. They claim that the idea of a dictatorship was invented by leftists who, in turn, insist that there are sufficient and indisputable evidences of the crimes committed by the dictatorial government. The evidences exist and are, in fact, indisputable, but the right-wing ideology uses the strategy of discrediting the people, groups, and institutions that present those evidences. The truth is in dispute. It turns out that a considerable part of leftist intellectuals, influenced by postmodern ideas, have spent a long time criticizing the use of the word “truth” by insisting that “truth” is a positivist illusion, that we cannot know reality itself, but only construct narratives about what we conventionally call reality. That is to say, reality would be a subjective construction of each individual or social groups. This epistemological relativism is also defended by neoliberalism, as it is the case with Hayek, who incorporated in his arguments for the freedom of economic agents, Michael Polanyi’s epistemology in which tacit knowledge is assumed to be the most important type of knowledge for social practice. Epistemological relativism is accompanied by cultural relativism that rejects the possibility of comparing knowledge because it is rooted in different cultures that were not comparable to each other. Relativism is not the best answer to obscurantism because both are negatively positioned in relation to knowledge of reality. If we admit that it is not possible to know what reality is, then we are also admitting that we cannot know what reality can become and will not, therefore, know what the different future alternatives would be and what actions would be most favorable for us to achieve more humane forms of reality.
 

The workshop, organized by Alessandra Capperdoni and led by Professor Giuseppe Vacca from the Gramschi Institute in Rome, Italy, was open to graduate students, faculty, and members of the public with a keen interest in Gramsci’s thought—his radical re-envisioning of Marxism rooted in the notions of politics as fight for hegemony, “passive revolution,” and philosophy of praxis as the culmination of the intellectual and moral reform movement of modernity.
 

The workshop, organized by the J. S. Woodsworth Chair in the Humanities, led by John Zucchi, and with responses from Rabbi Philip Bregman, Donald Grayston, and Jennifer Pierce, was open to graduate students, faculty, and members of the public.

Abstract

This workshop is for those who are interested in a more in-depth discussion of Pope Francis and the issues raised in the public lecture. The main point of the lecture and followup workshop is to facilitate an interfaith conversation about the Pope's stance on issues like climate change, the plight of refugees, and human rights, to name a few. Rabbi Philip Bregman, Donald Grayston, and Jennifer Rae Pierce will be participating in this conversation by presenting their responses to Dr. John Zucchi's lecture, in which he addresses Catholics, non-Catholics, non-Christians, and those of no particular faith adherence.

The workshop, organized by the J. S. Woodsworth Chair in the Humanities and led by Becky R. Lee, Tak-ling Terry Woo, and Kate Power, was open to graduate students, faculty, and members of the public.

Abstract

Using the chapters of Canadian Women Shaping Diasporic Religious Identities as an illustration, we will explore how focusing on women’s participation in their religious traditions complicates our understanding of diaspora and settler communities. The principal question for this seminar, then, is how we might best capture the beliefs and or devotional aspects of the lives of women who engage in traditional ways of religiosity. You will have the opportunity to work with excerpts from real conversations—and we will pay particular attention to the potential of discourse analytic methods to bring some complexity and nuances to confront the negative stereotypes in terms of which religious individuals and groups are often depicted.
 

The workshop, organized by the Institute for the Humanities and led by Ian Angus, was open to graduate students, faculty, and members of the public.

Abstract

This paper investigates phenomenological philosophy as the critical consciousness of modernity beginning from that point in the Vienna Lecture where he discounts Papuans and Gypsies, and includes America, in defining Europe as the spiritual home of reason. Its meaning is analyzed through the introduction of the concept of institution (Urstiftung) in Crisis. It argues that the historical fact of encounter with America can be seen as an event for reason insofar as the encounter includes elements previously absent in the European entelechy. The conclusion shows that phenomenology must become a comparative, Socratic, diagnosis of the planetary crisis of reason. The entelechy of reason that becomes evident through the concept of institution should be understood less as a renewal of a pre-existing tradition than as an exogenic encounter and incursion of an outside that together define an event as new in relation to its tradition.