ICS Seminar Series - Rodrigo Nunes

Date: Thursday, 5 March 2020
Time: 11.30am–1pm
Venue: EZ.G.23, Parramatta South campus, Western Sydney University

Organisation as Ecology: A New Approach to Collective Action

Professor Rodrigo Nunes (Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil)

Discussant: Professor Brett Neilson

Abstract

Debates on the "organisation question" often appear to share the covert assumption that the question admits of only one answer: there is one ideal organisational form that should be replicated everywhere, or one organisation to which everyone should ideally belong. In recent years, however, a different approach has been developing which starts from a contrary premise: that organised collective action always exists within a larger ecology, and the question of organisation must therefore be posed ecologically before it is thought at the level of individual organisations. In this talk, I outline a short genealogy of this move and seek to draw out some of its implications, as well as its difference to the more widely known idea of "horizontality".

Biography

Rodrigo Nunes is professor of modern and contemporary philosophy at the Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro (PUC-Rio), Brazil. He is the author of Organisation of the Organisationless. Collective Action After Networks (London: Mute, 2014) and of numerous articles in publications such as Les Temps Modernes, Radical Philosophy, South Atlantic Quarterly, International Journal of Communication, Nueva Sociedad, Viewpoint and others, as well as several media outlets. His new book, Beyond the Horizontal. Rethinking the Question of Organisation, is forthcoming with Verso.