Seminars and events

Our regular interdisciplinary seminar series, teach-ins and conferences act as a focus for cooperative research for both staff and students and feature visiting and Glasgow-based speakers. The seminars and events are open to the public. Watch recordings of talks at the Centre here. A full archive of past seminars and events since 2009 can be found here.

Upcoming talks:

Friday 2nd May 2025, 11am-1pm, Room 412, East Quadrangle (Geography), University of Glasgow

Kevin Anderson (UC Santa Barbara): 'Marx's Late Writings: Theories of Revolutionary Change and Alternatives to Capitalism'

In his last years, Karl Marx (1818-83) sketches three types of revolutionary change, each of them different from the united working class uprising that forms the conclusion of the first volume of Capital. Important as that rigorously dialectical, though abstract model is, it does not deal with race, colonialism, gender, the state, or other concrete factors discussed in some of his other writings, especially his late – largely unpublished – writings. (1) In 1869-70, Marx speculated that a British workers uprising might be sparked by one in Ireland led by the peasant-based Fenian nationalist movement. Inside Britain, English chauvinism and prejudice towards the Irish blunted working class solidarity and retarded formation of class consciousness. (These Marx writings build upon those of the 1860s on race, class, and revolution during the US Civil War.)  (2) During the 1870s, Marx clarifies and deepens his concept of communism in the German and French editions of Capital (1867-75), in the Civil War in France (1871), and especially in the Critique of the Gotha Program (1875), where he sketches non-statist forms of free and associated labor that go far beyond the more centralist and statist notions put forward in the Communist Manifesto. (3) In his 1877-82 writings on Russia, Marx suggests that resistance in its communal villages against capitalist encroachments could lead to a form of modern communism, if this resistance could link up with the Western European labor movement.  On Algeria, India, and Latin America, his notes on communal village structures and anti-colonial resistance imply something similar, and also take up gender in a serious way. 

Kevin Anderson is Distinguished Professor of Sociology, Political Science, and Feminist Studies, University of California, Santa Barbara. He grew up in the New York-New Jersey metropolitan area and attended Trinity College, Hartford, during which time he became active in the social justice movements of the late 1960s, like Students for a Democratic Society, Hartford’s Other Voice, and the Black Panther Defense Committee. In the 1970s, he became a Marxist-Humanist and a scholar-activist, which is when he drove a taxi for five years. He received a PhD in Sociology from the City University of New York Graduate Center in 1983.
 
Kevin lived in the Chicago area for 25 years, during which time he taught at Northern Illinois and Purdue Universities and served as Literary Agent for the Estate of Raya Dunayevskaya. Since 2009, he has  been teaching in the Sociology Department at the University of California, Santa Barbara, with affiliations to the Departments of Political Science, Feminist Studies, and Global Studies. Since 2009, he has also been active in social justice movements in the Los Angeles area, where he works with the International Marxist-Humanist Organization. He has held fellowships and grants from the American Council of Learned Societies and the National Endowment for the Humanities, among others. My books include Marx at the Margins: On Nationalism, Ethnicity, and Non-Western Societies (University of Chicago Press, 2010/2016-also French-Japanese-Turkish-Persian-Arabic-Portuguese), Foucault and the Iranian Revolution: Gender and the Seductions of Islamism (with Janet Afary, University of Chicago Press, 2005- also Turkish-Portuguese), and Lenin, Hegel, and Western Marxism (University of Illinois Press, 1995- also Chinese-Turkish-Japanese).
 

Friday 28th March, 11am-1pm, Room 412, East Quadrangle (Geography), University of Glasgow

Nahia Santander, ‘The Conquest of Political Freedom and Democracy in the Thought of the Young Lenin (1893-1905)’

This talk explores the question of the conquest of political freedom and democracy in Lenin’s thought, analysing his writings up to the first Russian revolution (1893-1905). It tries to shed light on the value and use of concepts such as tsarist autocracy, democratic revolution, revolutionary provisional government, people's sovereignty and democratic republic, studying the link of revolutionary Marxism with themes proper to the democratic and republican tradition. Starting from Lenin's reflections, it is shown that Social Democracy has not set itself up in opposition to democracy, but has made its full realisation its own, fighting for the masses of the people to conquer their right to rule.

Nahia Santander is a visiting PhD student, based at the Altamira Faculty of Social Sciences and Communication, University of the Basque Country

Friday 14th March, 11am-1pm, Room 412, East Quadrangle (Geography), University of Glasgow

Mitaja Chakraborty,  ‘Engaging the field: meaning making in the local activism spaces in Dhaka, Bangladesh’

Feminists from the global south have put forth the idea of an anti-colonial feminist solidarity with an emphasis on the intersections of race, class, caste, sexuality, gender, nation and colonialism. This presentation draws from that feminist tradition to call attention to the methodological concerns of doing feminist research on labour in South Asia. Located in the Bangladeshi garment workers’ movements and local labour activist networks, this presentation foregrounds the role of activist spaces that sustain movements as well as families by replenishing the labour power, will and aspirations of an entire workforce. Being a well-researched ‘subject’ community for transnational rights organisations, garment workers and union leaders in Bangladesh are aware of and prepared to respond to the standard questions about their work and struggles whenever an international researcher visits the industrial belts in the suburbs of Dhaka.

In this presentation, I will explore the modalities of how feminist research can centre the concerns of labour and gender on “life-making” processes that unfold in the field. This not only requires one to record the field in its “thick descriptions” and the peculiarities of gendered care-work, but also to be mindful of that immersion and be cautious of the narratives of loss, labour and sympathy that the transnational campaigns weave. In doing so, I undertake a mixed methods approach where I contextualise the field through observations, interviews and secondary materials in the form of campaign reports and documentary movies. This paper proposes to recentre the work, union and community spaces as an important site of reproduction of labour power marking a shift from the conjugal/domestic spaces. In the process, this paper would also explore the complicated relationship between an international researcher and the workers, in a field as dynamic as the garment industry in Dhaka, where meaning making becomes a two-way process – between the main actors in the field and an outsider extending (fruitless) solidarity.

Mitaja Chakraborty is a Neil Davidson Postdoctoral Writing Fellow at the School of Social and Political Sciences, University of Glasgow. She has completed her PhD at the University of Hyderabad, India. Her thesis, titled “What Makes Garment(s) Work: Gendered labour and networks of struggle in the garment industry of Dhaka, Bangladesh”, looked at how worker subjectivities emerge and take shape in the industrial areas and shopfloors through work and labour movements. She has had the experience of teaching academic and research writing and courses of legal and social understanding of work in different universities in India. Her primary interest lies in the field of labour and gender history, feminist research methodologies, sociological writing and transnational networks of solidarity. 

Friday 28th February, 11am-1pm, Room 412, East Quadrangle (Geography), University of Glasgow

Fred Carter,  ‘Refusing the Nuclear Housework: Entropy, Crisis, & Marxist-feminist Aesthetics after 1973’

As an index of crisis, the year 1973 weighs heavily on Marxist theory. It is at once the apex of a long economic downturn and the crystallization of an emergent structure of feeling marked by energy shortages, secular stagnation, and spiraling financialisation. More recently, accounts of the 1970s have historicized this false summit of peak oil and its attendant anxieties around limits to growth as the entrenchment of relations between superfluous labour, fictitious capital, and fossil fuels that now come to constitute the energy impasse of the present (Diamanti 2021). Less frequently acknowledged, perhaps, is how the short-term growth of the fossil economy was subtended by offloading the costs of crisis onto the terrain of social reproduction in the form of fuel price hikes, welfare cuts, and nuclearisation. Miners’ strikes, rather than social struggles over housing, health, and care work, tend to bookend this decade of struggle.

Assembling an archive of Marxist-feminist print culture, radical poetics, and performance practice, this paper follows entropy as a figure of anxiety for growth. This “entropic tendency” (Vishmidt 2017), I argue, offers a distinctive “resource aesthetic” (Bellamy, Simpson, & O’Driscoll 2015) which renders the transition from postwar surplus to terminal crisis acutely legible. From the “refusal of nuclear housework” to the saboteurial impulse embodied in the “high-entropy worker,” the prospect of unavailable energy appears as a persistent problem for capital and an analogue for its structural incapacity to valorise forms of “unproductive” labour (Midnight Notes 1979). Taking up this figural form as an energetic and aesthetic category linked to limit, crisis, or exhaustion, entropy appears across Marxist-feminist praxis and practice in an indexical relation with “capital’s endemic tendency to devolve towards its own generalized crisis of reproduction” (Best 2021). 

Fred Carter is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Glasgow, where he is a core member of the Infrastructure Humanities Group. His current monograph project, Poetry & Energy After 1973, traces the emergence of a poetics of exhaustion and politics of refusal against intersecting crises of petroleum, productivity, and social reproduction. He is director of the practice research residency FieldARTS and his first poetry chapbook, Outages, was published in May with Veer Press.

Thursday 6 February 2025, 4-5.30pm, Room 915, 42 Bute Gardens (formerly the Adam Smith Building), University of Glasgow

Andrew Smith on Class and the Uses of Poetry: Symbolic Enclosures

Respondents: Bridget Fowler and Les Back

Synopsis: How does it come about that, in George Orwell’s words, ‘the divorce between poetry and popular culture is accepted as a sort of law of nature’? Drawing on qualitative research conducted in and around Glasgow, Class and the Uses of Poetry explores how working-class readers engaged with, made sense of, and contested a sense of exclusion from, contemporary poetry. In doing so it sheds light on the symbolic enclosure of poetry, on how that enclosure takes shape in the encounter between readers and poems, but also on why poetry continues to matter. Through these conversations, and in further interviews with unpublished poets, it reflects on the creative and expressive affordances of poetry, on what can be done with poetry and what it can make possible.

Andrew Smith is Professor of Sociology at the University of Glasgow. He is the author of C.L.R. James and the Study of Culture (2010), Racism and Everyday Life (2015) and Class and the Uses of Poetry (2024).

Bridget Fowler is Emeritus Professor of Sociology at the University of Glasgow. She is the author of The Alienated Reader: Women and Popular Romantic Literature in the Twentieth Century (1991), Pierre Bourdieu and Cultural Theory (1997) and The Obituary as Collective Memory (2007). 

Les Back is Professor of Sociology, and former Head of the Division of Sociological and Cultural Studies, at the University of Glasgow. He is the author of The Art of Listening (2007), Academic Diary: Or Why Higher Education Still Matters (2016), and co-author of Migrant City (2018) and The Unfinished Politics of Race (2022).

                                              ALL WELCOME

 For more information on the series, contact Vassiliki Kolocotroni and Dave Featherstone