Events
Poster for the MCT 2024 Fall

We invite you to attend the Fall 2024 MCT lecture series, featuring discussions on contemporary theory and its varied engagements. Lectures will be held every Tuesday from 5:15 to 6:45 PM in Levis 210. Face masks are encouraged for in-person attendance.

The series is coordinated with graduate seminars on critical theory across multiple departments but is open to all faculty, students, and others who may wish to join. Please note that the lectures will not be live-streamed for remote viewers, though some may be recorded (pending speaker permission). You can access previous MCT lectures in our video collections.

For participants not enrolled in one of the affiliated courses, see the Box folder of corresponding readings for each lecture. To access the box folder, please email us for the password. To see the poster in a larger format, click here. For more information, including the password to access the readings, please email Unit-for-Criticism@illinois.edu.

Schedule

Sept 3  WELCOME RECEPTION at Pizzeria Antica

Sept 10 INTRODUCTION TO THEORY ("What Does the Present Feel Like?")

Jordan Alexander Stein (English, Fordham University)

  • D.W. Winnicott, "Fear of Breakdown," International Review of Psychoanalysis (1974).
  • Lauren Berlant, "Genre Flailing," Capacious: A Journal for Emerging Affect Inquiry 1.2 (2018).
  • Jordan Alexander Stein, "Stuck Theory," from Avidly Reads Theory (2019).
  • Rei Terada, "Impasse as a Figure of Political Space," Comparative Literature 72.2 (2020).
  • Adam Fales, "Streaming the Polycrisis," The Yale Review (2023).

Sept 17  MODERN PHILOSOPHY: HEGEL

Sebastian Rand (Philosophy, Georgia State University)

  • Selections on method and idealism:
    • Science of Logic
      • GW 21:37-41, GW 21:47-49, GW 12:17-25, GW 12:236-249
    • Phenomenology of Spirit
      • PhG ¶¶ 56-66, PhG ¶ 79
  • Selections on animal life:
    • Science of Logic
      • GW 12:173-199
    • Philosophy of Nature (Encyclopedia Part II)
      • E § 337, E §§ 350-376 (without Zusätze)

Sept 24  MARXISM

Zsuzsa Gille (Sociology, UIUC) & Lou Turner (Urban and Regional Planning, UIUC)

From Zsuzsa Gille:

Primary Readings:

  • Alan P Rudy. "On ANT and Relational Materialisms," Capitalism Nature Socialism, 16:4 (2005): 109-125
  • Diana Coole and Samantha Frost. "Introducing the new materialisms." New materialisms: Ontology, agency, and politics (2010): 1-43.
  • Noel Castree. "False antitheses? Marxism, nature and actor‐networks." Antipode 34, no. 1 (2002): 111-146.
  • Donald MacKenzie. "Marx and the Machine." Technology and culture 25, no. 3 (1984): 473-502.

From Lou Turner:

Primary Readings:

  • Letter to Arnold Ruge on radicalism
  • ‘Private Property and Communism’ (1844)
  • ‘Critique of the Hegelian Dialectic’ (1844)
  • Excerpt from ‘Wage Labor and Capital’ on the Negro (1847)
  • Capital: Preface to first edition (1867); ch. 1, The Commodity; ch. 10, The Working Day; Part VIII, ‘So-Called Primitive Accumulation’: ch. 31, ‘Genesis of the Industrial Capitalist,’ ch. 32, ‘Historical Tendency of Capitalist Accumulation.’ (1873)
  • Marx to Kugelman, June 27, 1870

Supplemental Readings:

  • Excerpt from article on revolution in Spain on use of American guerrilla warfare
  • Chapter 10 of ‘Capital’ on the ‘working day’
  • Marx’s 1862 article on Lincoln
  • Marx to Laura Marx-Lafargue, from Algeria
  • Lou Turner, Reconstruction Race, Rights and Rebellion in the Custodial State: A Post-Los Angeles Marxian Reconstruction (Critical Sociology, 2014).
  • Raya Dunayevskaya, Marxism & Freedom (pdf of the book not provided here)

Oct 1  PSYCHOANALYSIS / ZOOM (Link hyperlinked)

Timo Storck (Psychologische Hochschule Berlin) 

  • Timo Storck. "The> uncommon< factor in psychotherapy and the role of negative skills: Why and how psychoanalysis offers an important contribution for Mental Health Practice today." Journal of Contemporary Psychotherapy (2024): 1-7.
  • Timo Storck. "Mentalized Alterity: Psychodynamic Work with Bodily Countertransference." In The Bodily Unconscious in Psychoanalytic Technique, pp. 185-205. Routledge.
  • Timo Storck and Rainer M. Holm-Hadulla. "Psychoanalysis as an Art of Meeting the Other: Now Moments, Moving Along, and the Possibility of Change." (2023).
  • Timo Storck. "Psychoanalytic and Psychodynamic Therapies," in The Sage encyclopedia of theory in psychology. Sage Publications, (2016).

Oct 8  No MCT lecture

Oct 15  FOUCAULT

Behrooz Ghamari-Tabrizi (Near Eastern Studies, Princeton University)

Primary Readings

  • Excerpts from Michel Foucault, "The Foucault Reader," Pantheon (1984).
    • "Introduction," pp.3-29
    • "Docile Bodies" from Discipline and Punish, pp. 179-187
    • "Panopticism" from Discipline and Punish, pp. 206-213
    • "We 'Other Victorians'" from The History of Sexuality, Volume I, pp. 292-329

Supplemental Readings

  • "Truth and Power" from Power/Knowledge, pp. 51-75
  • "The Body of the Condemned" from Discipline and Punish, pp. 170-178
  • "The Means of Correct Training" from Discipline and Punish, pp. 188-205
  • "Repressive Hypothesis" from The History of Seculaity, Volume I, pp. 301-329

Oct 22  CRITICAL RACE THEORY

Eddie O'Byrn (African American Studies, UIUC) & Emma Velez (Gender & Women’s Studies, UIUC)

  • Camisha A Russell. "Introduction: From What Race Is to What Race Does" in The assisted reproduction of race. Indiana University Press, 2018.
  • Angela Davis. "Lectures on liberation." Los Angeles: Committee to Free AngelaDavis.[Google Scholar] (1971).
  • Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw. "Race to the Bottom: How the post-racial revolution became a whitewash." The Baffler, (2017)
  • Kristie Dotson. "On the way to decolonization in a settler colony: Re-introducing Black feminist identity politics." AlterNative: An International Journal of Indigenous Peoples 14, no. 3 (2018): 190-199.

Oct 29  POSTCOLONIALISM

Tithi Bhattacharya (History, Purdue University)

  • Chapters from Social reproduction theory: Remapping class, recentering oppression. (2017)
    • Tithi Bhattacharya, "Introduction: Mapping Social Reproduction Theory" pp. 1-20
    • Nancy Frasers, "Crisis of Care? On the Social-Reproductive Contradictions of Contemporary Capitalism" pp. 21-36
    • Tithi Bhattacharya, "How Not to Skip Class: Social Reproduction of Labor and the Global Working Class" pp. 68-93
  • Diane Paton, "Gender History, Global History, and Atlantic Slavery: On Racial Capitalism and Social Reproduction," The American Historical Review, Volume 127, Issue 2, June 2022, Pages 726–754

*Nov 4  REPRESENTATION & SEMIOTICS / Levis 208

Angharad Valdivia (Latino/Latina Studies and Institute of Communications Research, UIUC emerita) & Kamala Russell (Anthropology, University of Chicago)

  • Cepeda, M. E. (2015). Beyond “filling in the gap”: the state and status of Latina/o Feminist Media Studies. Feminist Media Studies, 16(2), 344–360. 
  • Valdivia, A. N. (2022).  “Father of the Bride.”   Australasian Journal of American Studies. 41:2, 117-123.
  • Valdivia, A. N. (2023).  “Visibilizing quinceañeras as generational and ethnic bridge:  Flashpoints of Latina girlhoods” in S. Mazzarella (Ed.) Routledge Companion to Girls’ Studies.

Nov 12   ENVIRONMENTAL HUMANITIES

Jane Desmond (Anthropology, UIUC) & Jamie Jones (English, UIUC)

Primary Readings

  • Neel Aruja, “Postcolonial ritique in a Multispecies World” PMLA, March 2009, vol. 124.No 2:556-563.
  • Neel Aruja, “The Analogy of Race and Species in Animal Studies,” Prism: theory and Modern Chinese Literature, vol. 18 (1), March 2021: 244-255.
  • Cara Daggett, "Introduction: Putting the World to Work." The Birth of Energy: Fossil Fuels, Thermodynamics, and the Politics of Work. Duke University Press, 2019.
  • Ursula Heise, "Introduction: Planet, species, justice—and the stories we tell about them" from the 2017 Routledge Companion to the Environmental Humanities.
  • Eben Kirksey and Stefan Helmreich, “The emergence of Multi-species Ethnography” Cultural Anthropology, vol. 25, #4:545-576.
  • Stephanie LeMenager, "Introduction: Ultradeep: Petroleum Culture in the American Century." Living Oil: Petroleum Culture in the American Century. Oxford University Press, 2014.
  • Rob Nixon, "Introduction," Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. Harvard University Press, 2011.
  • Kenneth Shapiro, “Human-Animal Studies: Remembering the Past, Considering the Present, Troubling the Future,” Animals and Society 2020: 797-833.
  • Anne Spice, "Fighting Invasive Infrastructures: Indigenous Relations against Pipelines." Environment and Society: Advances in Research 9 (2018): 40-56.

  • Kari Weil, Thinking Animals: Why Animal Studies Now? New York: Columbia University Press, 2012, ISBN: 9780231148085.

Supplemental Readings and Resources

  • Online resources through the Center for Advanced Study, Human-Animal Studies@Illinois Initiative, Jane Desmond, Resident Director:
    • “Critical Conversations” introductory bibliographies
      • Short bibliographies offering on-ramps to work at the intersection of African-American Studies, Latino/a/Latinx Studies, Asian-American Studies, Indigenous Studies, Gender and Sexuality Studies, and Disability Studies—with Human-Animal Studies.
      • Prepared for HAS@Illinois Initiative by graduate student August Hoffman. By no means meant to be comprehensive, instead these bibliographies are meant to supply an easy means for scholars new to this work to begin to explore and develop further the critical conversations that are happening at these intersections of interdisciplinary fields and to promote their future development both on campus and beyond.
    • Video Library of past guest speakers lectures (videos from live presentations) of the international Animal Studies Summer Institute for early career scholars, held at UIUC in 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, (virtual 2021), pandemic pause, back in person: 2023, 2024.
      • Speakers include Dinesh Wadiwel, Claire Jean Kim, Jenny Davis, Barbara King, Una Chaudhuri, MariaElena Garcia, Chris Green, Nigel Rothfels, Evan Mwangi, Gene Robinson, May Barenbaum, Ken Shapiro, Jenn Parker-Starbuck, among others.
      • Resident director, Jane Desmond. Co-director, Kim Marra. External Collaborating orgs: the Animals and Society Institute (pre-pandemic years); Brooks Foundation (2023, 2024).
    • H-Animal for up-to-date announcements.
  • For discussions of terminology, Lori Gruen (ed.)’s Critical Terms for Animal Studies (Chicago: U of Chicago Press, 2018).
  • For ongoing campus conversations across multiple disciplines, grad students and faculty are welcome to join the UIUC Animal Turn Research cluster (Jamie Jones and Jane Desmond, co-directors). Come share your work with us!

Nov 19  GENDER

Jordan Pascoe (Philosophy, Manhattan College; George A. Miller Visiting Scholar, UIUC) & K. Allison Hammer (Women, Gender & Sexuality Studies, Southern Illinois University)

  • Simone de Beauvoir. "Author's Introduction," The Second Sex, trans. HM Parshley. Lowe and Brydone, 1953.
  • K. Allison Hammer. "Introduction: Rejecting 'American' Manhood," Masculinity in Transition. U of Minnesota Press, 2023.
  • Audre Lorde. "Age, Race, Class and Sex: Women Redefining Difference," Sister outsider: Essays and speeches. Crossing Press, 2012.
  • Jordan Pascoe. "The Whiteness of Consent," Consent: Gender, Power, and Subjectivity, ed. Laurie James-Hawkins and Róisín Ryan-Flood. Routledge, 2023.