Polemics IN Practice

On the (ir)reconcilability of Marxism and Post-Structural Thought

Intense contestation has been embedded in the historical trajectory for a politics of social change both inside and outside of the academy. Marxist thought asserts that ideas of social change can be conceived most effectively at the site of production and circulation within capitalist economies. How these processes intricately construct, reproduce and affect the subjectivities involved remains under-theorized.

Conversely, the post-structural focus on the construction and reproduction of these subjectivities deems the political-economic context a minor aspect in terms of understanding the reproduction of violence and oppression.

Such simplified articulations, however, have significant consequences: a failure to address the complexities that exist amid these positions; an inability to recognize a common vision that underlies such articulations; and the reproduction of difference within such a politics of social change, which ensures the continuation of the very violence these articulations seek to eradicate.

The question becomes: How can we (as academics and activists) come together at such a site of contestation, with the mutual vision of eradicating violence and oppression, to develop a politics of social change that can work together instead of work to divide? The possibility that this very question is implicated in the reproduction of such violence causes us to further ask what the limitations and possibilities are of imagining a Polemics IN Practice.

In the spirit of collaboration and connectivity then, we invite submissions of multiple forms (ideas, commentaries, papers, and/or position papers) that seek to address one of the following five themes (and their corresponding sub-questions):

(1) Marxism & Post-structuralism
• What are the various histories and trajectories of Marxism, Post-structuralism, and combinations/collaborations of these theoretical standpoints?
• How do these standpoints conceptualize power, ideology and the subject?
• What are their political intentions/non-intentions, and what kinds of questions do they enable us to ask?

(2) Contests, Conflicts, Struggles
• What are material/political examples that can be read through one (or multiple) of these theoretical standpoints? What are the limitations and possibilities of these readings?
• How do such readings make evident the contrasts and interconnectivities of the various theoretical standpoints?

(3) Historical Memory, Forgetting & Pedagogy
• How can we re-think notions of historical memory & forgetting in context of these various theoretical conceptualizations?
• What pedagogical spaces make possible the eradication of existing barriers towards a contemporary politics of social change?

(4) The inevitability of violence?: Reform and/or Revolution
• How have the various theoretical frameworks been used to enact reform and/or revolution? How do these examples make us re-think a contemporary practice of politics – particularly in the context of dealing with power and the reproduction of violence?
• Is violence inevitable in a politics of social change?

Date of Submissions: March 6, 2009
Please submit an abstract of no more than 500 words that seeks to address one of the themes above.

Email submissions to: polemicsinpractice@gmail.com

Date of conference: March 21, 2009
Location: Munk Centre for International Studies, Room 208N

Presented by Future Collectivities Nexus and the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education
Sponsored by the Asian Institute and the Graduate Student Union