Postgraduate Seminars

Philosophy at Western Sydney University organises a number of seminars designed specifically for postgraduate students. These graduate seminars offer Higher Degree Research students an opportunity to engage directly with visiting speakers and guests.

Past seminars

Prof Bonnie Honig on "Three Types of Emergency"

Wednesday, 17 April 2013
3.00 pm - 5.00 pm
Building 3, Room 3.G.54
University of Western Sydney, Bankstown Campus

Required reading: Three Models of Emergency Politics
For more information, please contact Dr Charles Barbour c.barbour@uws.edu.au.
Everyone welcome.

Biography: Bonnie Honig is Sarah Rebecca Roland Professor of Political Science at Northwestern University and senior research professor at the American Bar Foundation in Chicago. She is the prize-winning author of Political Theory and the Displacement of Politics (Cornell UP, 1993), Democracy and the Foreigner (Princeton UP, 2001), Emergency Politics: Paradox, Law, Democracy (Princeton UP, 2009) and Antigone, Interrupted (Cambridge UP, 2013). She has edited or co-edited: Feminist Interpretations of Hannah Arendt (Penn State UP, 1995), Skepticism, Individuality and Freedom: The Reluctant Liberalism of Richard Flathman (Minnesota UP, 2002) and the Oxford Handbook of Political Thought (Oxford UP, 2006) and her work has been translated into Swedish, Spanish, Italian, French, Greek, and Japanese.

Kiarina Kordela Seminars on "Spinoza's Authority"

Tuesday, 7 August and Wednesday, 8 August 2012 
2.00 pm - 4.00 pm
Room 3.G.27
University of Western Sydney, Bankstown
Everyone welcome.

In these two seminars we shall focus on excerpts from Spinoza's Theologico-Political Treatise in order to approach his conceptualization of political power as a system that negotiates authority and freedom. We shall see how this intertwining of authority and freedom both anticipates more contemporary conceptualizations of political power, such as (Gramsci's) hegemony and (Foucault's) biopolitics, and critiques them.

Required Reading:Spinoza, Theologico-Political Treatise, Preface and chapters IV, XIV, XVI, and XX.
Please read the text before the first seminar.
The readings can be made available upon request.

Biography: Kiarina Kordela is a professor of German and Director of the Critical Theory Program at Macalester College. She is a visiting professor at the University of Western Sydney, Australia and the author of $urplus: Spinoza, Lacan (SUNY Press, 2007), Being, Time, Bios: Capitalism and Ontology (SUNY Press, forthcoming 2013), and co-editor, with Dimitris Vardoulakis, of Freedom and Confinement in Modernity: Kafka's Cages (Palgrave-Macmillan, 2011). She has published on a wide range of topics in several collections and journals, including Angelaki, Cultural Critique, Political Theory, Parallax, Rethinking Marxism, and Umbr(a). Her "Biopolitics: Transhistorically and Historically" is forthcoming in Differences.