Talks 2024 –
I will be teaching the course Resilience, Governance and Complex International Relations.
Today the biggest challenge facing policymakers is the problem of complexity. In a complex world, it is seemingly much more difficult to govern, and to act instrumentally to fulfil policy goals. The course introduces students to the theoretical frameworks and practices of the politics of complexity, the debates that have been triggered, and the way that complexity understandings have developed, especially in the 2000s and 2010s. Emphasis is placed upon introducing students to some of the conceptual frameworks deployed in understanding system effects on political, economic and social life and how these enable us to rethink governance, power and agency. This course is also very practically orientated, it engages with how complexity is reflected in new approaches to policy-making and understanding, particularly focusing on how problems are responded to and the distinctions between preventive policy-understandings, resilience/bouncing back approaches and more transformative understandings of how to engage with a complex world. Full syllabus details:
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3-5 July 2024 11th European Workshops in International Studies, Istanbul, Turkey
I am co-convening Workshop 11, Working with the Negative (with Valerie Waldow, Otto-von-Guericke University, Magdeburg) Workshop Description: This workshop seeks to explore the potential of ‘working with the negative’ in the context of IR. We address the theme The future yet to come: for a global politics of hope by inviting participants to delve deeper into the problematic of how we engage critically with what exists while avoiding either the disavowal of modernity’s violences and exclusions or risking their reproduction. We seek to open up ‘the negative’ as a space for rethinking fundamental concepts such as worlds, subjectivity, agency, temporality, resistance and refusal. The concept of negativity has its roots in Hegelian, Post-Hegelian and Marxist scholarship, as well as in Frankfurt School Critical Theory and in contemporary Critical Black Studies. In this context, negativity emerges as a critical perspective that challenges and disrupts the boundaries and divisions of modernity, rather than moving to produce or claim new ontological certainties and alternative modes of governance. Many contemporary approaches within IR, particularly those rooted in relational paradigms and concerned with the Anthropocene, work with the negative in ways that are generative of non-modernist approaches to the world and our current predicament. Often framed as ‘post- apocalyptic’ these approaches declare a radical break with modernity as having already occurred, paving the way for new and creative ways of ‘living on in the ruins’. Other approaches work with the negative but seek to ‘stay with the trouble’ of modernity as a condition we cannot just read or write our way out of. We seek to critically explore different ways of working with the negative at the end of/ after/ and in opposition to modernist framings and to interrogate the stakes in assuming that modernity is ending/ has ended/ still requires ending.
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Wednesday 15 May 2024
16:45 Roundtable 4 – Deconstruction and Design
Speakers: Daniela Gandorfer, David Chandler and Michael Hennessy Picard
Thursday 16 May 2024
15:45 Panel 4 – Barbara Koole and Tasniem Anwar – Tricksters; Jonathan Pugh and David Chandler – Abyss(al Critique); Daniel Bertram – Patches; Ruth Fletcher – Chronologality
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Tuesday 14 May 2024
I will speaking at the Undoing Anthropocene Certainties: Book Launch, the launch of two interventions in Anthropocene thought: Arthur Petersen’s Climate, God and Uncertainty and Elisa Randazzo and Hannah Richter’s Challenging Anthropocene Ontology: Modernity, Ecology and Indigenous Complexities. North Cloisters of the UCL Wilkins Building (main building), London, WC1E 6BT, 5.00- 8.00pm. Eventbrite tickets.
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Wednesday 8 May 2024
David Chandler and Claire Colebrook discussing Hope as Site of Global Dis/Ordering, as part of the Underworlds series, organised by QMUL (the Institute for Humanities and Social Sciences and the Centre for Law and Society in a Global Context) and the LSE Law School.
2:00 pm – 3:00 pm Book now
Moving beyond modernist modes of seeing and ordering the world – ways of governing often entangled with sentimental tropes of liberal hope – this event will reflect on hope as a set of sensibilities and practices of living after the end of the world. Hope is seen, in this sense, as a specific mode for dis/ordering the world and our place within it. This entails an attentiveness to the diverging onto-epistemologies that sustain varying expressions of hope, as well as the political subjectivities and forms of refusal and resistance these engender. What is the space of hope and hopelessness (or the death of hope) in a context of mass extinction and its many foreclosed futurities? Which expressions of hope (speculative, pragmatic, nihilist) can be foregrounded against the ever-receding horizon of liberal hope?
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5-6 May 2024
I will be attending and presenting at the international workshop ‘Governing in the Polycrisis’, Barcelona Centre for International Affairs (CIDOB), Barcelona.
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3 April – 6 April 2024, ISA 2024 Annual Convention, San Francisco, California, USA
Thursday 4 April 2024
TC77: Biopolitics and Governmentalities of the Anthropocene
1:45 pm – 3:30 pm Union Square 10, Fourth Floor Hilton San Francisco Union Square
Chair/Discussant Jason R. Weidner; Papers: David Chandler, Biopolitics: From Neoliberalism to the Anthropocene; Nicolas Gäckle, Making oneself at home (in the end): towards a genealogy of climate anxiety; Jason R. Weidner, The Biopolitics and Necropolitics of Population in the Anthropocene; Linea Cutter, To Eat or Not to Eat: Appetites of the Anthropocene and the Governmentality of Dietary Choice; Timothy Luke, Planetarian Biopolitics: The Anthropocene as “End of the World” Ecomanagerialism
Friday 5 April 2024
FA52: Dark IR: Unearthing political possibility beyond the world of relational totality
8:15 am – 10:00 am Hearst, Level Four Parc 55 San Francisco
Participant Roundtable: Chair: Ignasi Torrent; Participants: Farai Chipato; Harshavardhan Bhat; Cameron Harrington; Andrew Culp; David Chandler
Saturday 6 April 2024
SA67: Critique beyond Relation: Panel 1 – Sociality, Aesthetics and Lifeworlds
8:15 am – 10:00 am Union Square 19, Fourth Floor Hilton San Francisco Union Square
Chair: David Chandler; Discussant: Laura Zanotti; Papers: Simon Stattin, Politics and truth reconsidered: Towards a transcendental naturalism of politics; Dhannjay Kumar Rai, Relationality, Anaesthetics and Neoliberalism; Matthew Gravlin, Indigenous Counterdispossession and the Limits of Relationality; Farai Chipato, The politics of negative aesthetics; Shahira Hathout, Anticipating the ‘Abyss’: Reading Rousseau’s ‘Savage Man’ (1753) through J. M. W. Turner’s Slave Ship Painting (1840)
SB40: Critique beyond Relation: Panel 2 – Immanence, Entanglement and Negation 10:30 am – 12:15 pm Mission 1, Parc 55 San Francisco
Papers: Laura Zanotti, Defending the critical and ethical potential of quantum onto epistemologies; Nijat Eldarov, Towards a critique of saturated immanence: New materialism and ecology of separation in critical security studies; Asli Calkivik, From Negation to Affirmation… And Back Again? On Dialectical Thinking and International Political Thought; Ignasi Torrent, Political Possibility and Entanglement Fetishism; Jonathan Pugh, The End of Infinity: critique after relational becoming
SC33: Planetary Politics and the Anthropocene
1:45 pm – 3:30 pm Union Square 22, Fourth Floor Hilton San Francisco Union Square
Chair: Jonathan Pugh; Discussant: David Chandler; Papers: Jamie Allinson, The Making of Fossil Sovereignty: IR Theory and the Historical Sociology of Energy Transition; Stefan Pedersen, Planetarism Ascendant: Earth System Cosmology and Planetary Ideology; Raj Kaithwar, Imagining New Materialist Geopolitics through Geographical Assemblages and Distributed Power in the Anthropocene; Benjamin Meiches, The Birds Strike Back: Animality and Aerial Empire
SD45: Critique beyond Relation: Panel 3 – Refusal, Withdrawal and Resistance 4:00 pm – 5:45 pm Union Square 2, Hilton San Francisco Union Square
Chair: Jonathan Pugh; Discussant: Asli Calkivik; Papers: Harshavardhan Bhat, Abolitional Meteorology, Geoffrey A. Whitehall, Resistance: A Concept; Nadine Voelkner, Viral disentanglements: thinking with the limits of relation; Christopher R. Zebrowski, How do we respond to the end of the world?
[SD66: The Russian War on Ukraine, World Order, and Ideological Realignment
4:00 pm – 5:45 pm Union Square 18, Fourth Floor Hilton San Francisco Union Square
Participant Roundtable: Chair: Shahar Hameiri; Discussant: Halit M. Tagma; Participants: Nicholas Kiersey; David Chandler; Philip Cunliffe; Claudia Wiesner; Niklas Bremberg; Jan Pospisil]
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Saturday 2 March 2024
‘Hope after the End of “Man”: Constructing New Genres of the Human’ presentation for the Oxford Human Sciences Symposium on Hope, Institute of Human Sciences, University of Oxford. Other presenters are cultural anthropologist Professor Eben Kirksey (University of Oxford) and ethno-ornithologist Professor Andrew Gosler (University of Oxford)
2.00pm -6.00pm, Institute for for Human Sciences (Pauling Centre), 58a Banbury Road, Oxford (map)
It is a hybrid event, you can also join on teams.
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Friday 26 January 2024
Recording a Lateral: Journal of the Cultural Studies Association, Positions podcast discussion of Jonathan Pugh and David Chandler’s The World as Abyss with Andrew Culp, Shauna Rigaud and Ayondela McDole. Podcast will be available shortly.
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Monday 22 January 2024
Discussion of Jonathan Pugh and David Chandler’s The World as Abyss with Foreign Objekt
10 am Pacific Time/ 6.00 pm UK time Meeting Link
Please join our guest speakers Jonathan Pugh and David Chandler for the launch of their new book The World as Abyss: The Caribbean and Critical Thought in the Anthropocene. The authors will give a presentation discussing the book which will be followed by an open discussion. Podcast will be available shortly.
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