Hannah Arendt and Common Worldbuilding in a New Age of Extremes
Consortium Launch Event

Conference Organisers: Professor Jo-Anne Dillabough, Associate Professor, Irit Katz, Dr Daniele Bassi (Post-Doctoral Fellow), Ayse Nal Akcay (Administrative Lead, ESRC Project Coordinator),

The Faculty of Education (FOE) is hosting a two-day conference in association with the launch of the Hannah Arendt Consortium (HAC) on Crises and Political Transformation. HAC is a pioneering FOE and Architecture initiative dedicated to the work of the renowned political theorist Hannah Arendt in relation to three key themes: common worldbuilding; exile and statelessness; and freedom, plurality and the promise of politics. In grounding the work of the consortium in these enduring Arendtian themes, we seek to confront the global challenges associated with political ‘crises’ past, present and future and assess how they are understood across a range of disciplines and transdisciplinary sites and their enduring relationship to justice. The consortium will serve as a humanities and social sciences research hub that examines concepts of political trust and confronts questions of global and urban conflict and refuge, the politics of knowledge production and the role of the critical intellectual, with a particular focus on the rise of populism and authoritarianism globally. It will therefore serve as an international centre of research excellence to both expand and enrich our understanding of our contemporary political landscape and its associated risks and threats to the future of democracy and to the concept of the university itself, as well as ways to imagine and promote new paths for political transformation. This two-day conference is designed to launch our joint initiative and to explore a range of Arendtian concepts in relation to HAC’s themes but with a particular focus on common worldbuilding in a new age of extremes. Both established and early career scholars and students in the fields of philosophy, intellectual history, architecture, memory studies, classics, sociology, gender studies, politics and education will be presenting their work across two days. The two keynote speakers are Professor Bonnie Honig and Professor Michalinos Zembylas. Please note that we have a maximum capacity of 70 people at the FOE for the two-day conference so registration is on a first come first serve basis.

The full launch program is available here.

Please note that a separate link for the jointly sponsored talk of Professor Honig can be found here.