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Postcolonial studies explores the economic, socio-political, and discursive legacies of the colonial worldview and how these legacies persist in today’s world. However, the field is currently facing criticism from multiple quarters. It has been described as anti-Enlightenment, Eurocentric, and even antisemitic. In my talk, I will examine how postcolonial studies contributes to rethinking the nature and scope of critical thought by addressing these serious concerns. I will demonstrate that such characterizations often stem from misunderstandings of the project of decolonization and argue that criticizing the Enlightenment and its legacies does not necessarily entail rejecting them, nor does engaging with Enlightenment principles mean endorsing them unconditionally. Unlike the decolonial approach, which views decolonization as an “epistemic delinking” from modernity, and in contrast to post-Adornian Frankfurt School Critical Theorists, who argue that criticism of the Enlightenment automatically leads to normative nihilism, I contend that critical theories of the future involve “employing the master’s tools to dismantle the master’s house” (Lorde).

This presentation critically examines the concept of ’polycrisis’, which is widely used to describe the interconnected and intensifying crises that characterise contemporary global society. Although the term has gained traction in academic, political, administrative and popular discourse, covering phenomena ranging from climate change and migration to inequality, authoritarianism and war, it remains theoretically underdeveloped. Existing accounts emphasise complexity and emergence, yet fail to resolve the question of whether complexity is the cause or the outcome of the polycrisis. Furthermore, they lack a coherent explanatory framework.

This presentation addresses these gaps by offering a Marxist analysis centred on the capitalist mode of production. It posits that the polycrisis is a systemic phenomenon, stemming from the structural dynamics of capitalism, rather than a diffuse convergence of unrelated crises. Drawing on Stuart Hall’s reworking of ’base and superstructure’, as well as Louis Althusser’s concept of ’overdetermination’, the presentation proposes a more robust theoretical basis for analysing the interaction of multiple crises without abandoning causal explanation. The analysis is further enriched by the sociological concept of ’reflexive modernisation’, whose historical narrative parallels accounts of the polycrisis by linking today’s cascading crises to the transformation of industrial capitalism into its post-industrial form.

In my presentation, I investigate Antonio Gramsci’s concept of hegemony with a view to its relevance in times of crisis. While the concept is often used to explain why changes don’t occur, I will instead point to its use for understanding those interregnal monsters mentioned in the quote. To this end, I argue that Gramsci’s concept of hegemony has a specific form that implies an irreducibly dual perspective: rather than seeing it as a generalized struggle for power, or as an explanation for the ”buying off” of the working classes, I contend that we must consider the fundamentally different stakes as well as goals involved for those already in power – wishing to uphold hegemony – when compared with those not yet in power – wishing to gain hegemony.

I identify Gramsci’s concept of the State as the key orientational node around which these struggles are formed, and consider its role for understanding the dynamics of Civil Society, where the struggle over hegemony has its seat. This dynamic is shown to include the determinations of the ”official” as well as the ”popular” as vital formants of any political struggle.

In the final part of the presentation, I consider what happens to the field of hegemonial struggles when what Gramsci calls ”a general crisis of the State” is initiated. I argue that the loss of legitimacy of the official State will split the dual perspective open, giving birth to monsters of different kinds: the repressive measures of the official State, the reactionary ”saviours of the status quo”, as well as the revolutionary monsters of the subaltern classes. As all monsters, these are both rare and hybrid beings, and they take the form of ”historical blocs”. A critical teratology is needed to diagnose them as well as to form our own monsters.

Among the crises that characterize the present moment, is an epistemic crisis. This crisis of knowledge involves a variety of issues: the spread of misinformation; science denial and broader science distrust; the decimation of the public sphere and other institutions of knowledge; the erosion of our epistemic capacities. What are the causes of this crisis? In this paper, I argue that a primary cause of the crisis is the structure of the capitalist system itself. I draw on Nancy Fraser’s recent account of the crises of capitalism in Cannibal Capitalism to argue that the epistemic crisis, like many other crises, is an expression of the cannibal nature of capitalism. One the one hand, capitalism depends on the production and dissemination of knowledge – e.g. scientific knowledge, the practical knowledge of workers, local knowledge in Hayek’s sense – in such a way that knowledge constitutes one of its conditions of possibility. One the other hand, capitalism undermines knowledge, and so yet another one of its own conditions of possibility. The central aim of the paper is to support this latter claim. I argue that capitalism erodes people’s time and energy and epistemic care, which are needed for appropriate knowledge acquisition, along with central knowledge institutions. My argument is needed because mainstream social epistemology largely ignores the material conditions of knowledge: it typically explains the epistemic crisis in terms of failures of individual or group cognition, or in terms of pernicious epistemic environments like echo chambers and filter bubbles, abstracted from their material causes. 

In contemporary Western societies marked by overlapping crises, questions of institutional trust have become increasingly central. Lack of trust is often framed as a threat to social cohesion, state legitimacy, and democratic governance. In this conference presentation, we approach distrust not as an individual attitude to be corrected, but as a structural outcome of immigration control. The presentation is based on an article examining a central contradiction in immigration governance: while authorities commonly valorise trust in principle, they simultaneously produce and enact mistrust through their administrative routines. Drawing on Marxist ideology theory in dialogue with trust research and migration studies, we argue that this contradiction between the values and practices of immigration control requires continuous reconciliation work at both individual and organizational levels. Empirically, we draw on two complementary datasets: residence permit decisions issued by the Finnish Immigration Service (Migri) and interviews with mixed-citizenship couples with first-hand experience of the asylum process. Our findings suggest that although immigration authorities in Finland–a high-trust liberal Nordic democracy–emphasize the importance of trust, their administrative practices may unsettle subjects whose expectations of institutional trustworthiness are not met in practice, thereby reproducing mechanisms of exclusion affecting both citizens and non-citizens.

This paper develops a feminist materialist theory of human “life‑force” (Eros) to deepen the critique of contemporary capitalism. Building on Nancy Fraser’s analysis of capitalism’s structural dependence on, and simultaneous erosion of, its conditions of possibility, we argue that social reproduction must be understood not only as gendered labour but as life‑producing practices that sustain human subjectivity, embodiment, and relationality. Drawing on psychoanalytical feminism, specifically Ulrike Prokop’s historical materialist object‑relations feminism, but disconnecting it from gendered life-spheres (Weiblicher lebenszusammenhang), and developing it with Hans Loewald’s re‑reading of Freuds notion of Eros, we conceptualise life‑force as a historically formed drive toward psychological growth and increasingly complex relations to the world,
which depends on non‑instrumental, affectively attuned care.

This perspective allows us to theorise a specifically emotional “rift” in capitalism, analogous to the metabolic and bodily rifts discussed in eco‑Marxism: when care and social reproduction are subsumed under profit logics, they generate burnout, depression, polarisation, and “cultures of uncare”, rather than thriving subjects. This impedes on the human freedom to shape history. Social reproduction, we argue, cannot be commodified “all the way down”, because its core task—mediating between inner drives and outer reality—breaks down when
reduced to instrumental goal‑realisation. We conclude that a feminist critique of capitalism must also be a struggle over the place of Eros: defending and expanding institutions and zones where life‑affirming practices are protected from commodification and can flourish as ends in themselves.

While modern democracies promise their citizens a life in peace, security and equality, their state institutions have a brutal track record of using unjustifiable violence against vulnerable and disadvantaged groups. Much theoretical work that addresses such violence in contexts like critical migration and globalization studies (Robinson 2014, Georgi 2019), police/prison abolitionism (Gilmore 2007, Thompson 2025), critical geography (Davis 2005) and protest studies (Clover 2016) shares an analytic framework that draws on Marx’s notion of “relative surplus populations” to understand state violence under contemporary capitalism. In this view, a dynamic intrinsic to capitalism produces groups that are no longer necessary for capitalist production and consumption. Since such groups pose a risk of creating social unrest and eventually organizing against the existing order, capitalist societies employ violent state institutions to “manage” those populations. 

My talk offers a critique of this paradigm, and works towards an alternative. Rather than due to a single underlying mechanism of human surplus production, contemporary state violence is due to a variety of different mechanisms. It targets groups that stand in very different relations to capitalist production, and the explanatory force of those relations in understanding state violence is limited. After mapping some of the relevant forms of violence and victim groups, I sketch an alternative framework that builds on Nancy Fraser’s analysis of capitalist society in Cannibal capitalism, and that locates the driving force behind state violence in interactions between capitalist economy and its political and social preconditions.

“The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born. In this interregnum, monsters appear.” Taking this clue, is apt to remind ourselves that Gramsci was a communist, and that any discussion of perspectives on the future after the interregnum is haunted by the specter of communism. Is communism a monster (as the mainstream imagination will have it) or is it something to hope for (as it also has been)? By recourse to the notion of the “Historical Sign” (Kant), my aim is to disentangle the concept of (political) hope from linear, progressivist ideas of Universal History. I offer an alternative reading of the interregnum (time of crisis) as a figure in the philosophy of history (regarded as attempts to pose and/or answer the question “what may I hope for?” on secular terms). In general terms, I plea for a move away from an understanding of the present as an abstract point of transition to an understanding of the presence of past and future in the historical now. More specifically, I want to reflect on how critical theory should remember communism.

Our times are characterized by political reaction, and nostalgia is often named as the affective culprit. Behind the rise of right-wing authoritarianism seems to lurk a nostalgia for an imagined past with stable hierarchies and homogenous communities. But even left-wing nostalgia for the post-war welfare state or the radical politics of the 60s and 70s is blamed for preventing us from developing radical, forward-looking political projects. In this talk, I challenge this commonsensical view of nostalgia as an affect that necessarily tethers us to the past. Rather than simply rejecting this feeling as conservative, or even distinguishing between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ nostalgia, I argue that we need to appreciate the phenomenology of nostalgia as the experience of historical loss. As the feeling of historical loss—an affect against the grain of history—nostalgia has thus always been an important driver of politics in a way that belies liberal narratives of history as the smooth unfolding of progressive potentials. Leaving these feelings to the political right risks leaving an important area of political-emotional contestation uncontested. Today’s manifestations of nostalgia, both on the right (for homogenous nation-states and heteronormative family structures) and the left (for the post-war welfare state), ultimately exhibit a longing for stability in a world of insecurity. A progressive political movement, rather than simply rejecting such longing as reactionary, needs to provide alternative political visions that can channel desires for stability and community while decoupling them from heteropatriarchy, white supremacy, and statism.

Confronted with contemporary authoritarian and fascist mobilization, we are frequently asked how those drawn to such movements might be convinced that they are wrong. This paper starts from the suspicion that this question already presupposes a misleading model of political transformation. Neither better arguments nor changing social conditions alone can explain how deeply entrenched ways of perceiving, feeling, judging, and acting are transformed.

Drawing on the psychoanalytic model of remembering, repeating, and working through, I propose to understand emancipation as a transformative process of experience: a process in which subjects do not first acquire the correct insight and subsequently change their beliefs and practices, but in which understanding, affect, self-relation, and agency are transformed through the process itself.

I suggest that social movements can be understood as privileged sites of such collective processes of experience. This perspective also gives a stronger meaning to the claim that social movements generate knowledge: they do not merely articulate standpoint knowledge or previously neglected experiences but transform the ways in which participants experience, interpret, and act within the social world. Knowledge production and social transformation thus emerge as two dimensions of the same process.

We propose the term cosy fascism to describe a digitally mediated fascist aesthetics that is promoted and generated by machine learning systems such as large language models (LLMs) and recommendation algorithms in social media. We argue that traditional definitions of fascism, by focusing on its stereotypically masculine elements, have failed to analyse the feminised versions of fascism that are generated and promoted in digital, algorithm-driven media. While Trump’s AI-generated images and videos can be analysed as exemplifying the instrumental reason and efficiency that Horkheimer and Adorno noted, the ultranationalism and revolutionary core noted by Griffin, the destruction of the public sphere noted by Arendt and the paramilitary violence noted by Eco and many other scholars of fascism, these are not helpful in understanding tradwife influencers, Modi’s use of the Ghibli filter, or the domestic fascism of many AI-generated stories. Recent research on technofascism (e.g. Coeckelburgh), is useful, but ignores this feminised digitally mediated fascism. Cosy fascism is generated by LLMs and promoted by social media algorithms partly because AI has been designed to filter out “toxic” content that is often masculine-coded, such as violence and aggression, and partly because AI promotes content that creates engagement, like cosy content. We situate the concept of “cosy” in Krzywinska et al.’s (2025) definition of cosy in relation to ideas of Home and the Other, also drawing upon Ngai’s theorisation of “cute” as an aesthetic category. We provide an overview of how key features of fascism in common definitions are recoded in cosy fascism. We propose that both recommendation algorithms in social media and large language models have a tendency to promote cosy fascist content because it is seemingly unproblematic (so not censored) and emotionally appealing (so humans like it and the machine learning algorithms learn to produce more of it).

This talk examines how AI systems give rise to new objects of, and means for, recognition struggles—from biased facial recognition to engagement algorithms that subvert protest goals, to digital institutional systems that rank individuals. The focus is on how AI-powered social media platforms and their underlying algorithms exploit fundamental human needs for recognition, which drive online engagement. Growing concern centers on how platform companies deploy advanced AI systems to capitalize on our social hunger for bonding, reward, and the bestowal of esteem, converting vital recognition needs into vulnerabilities to be monetized.  

However, recognition theorists examining contemporary protest movements and online activism have largely overlooked these effects of AI systems on struggles for recognition. In this talk, I propose a framework for understanding the AI-enabled exploitation of recognition needs through algorithmic recognition mechanisms, debate why such exploitation is objectionable, and theorize how it may give rise to new forms of recognition struggles that demand urgent attention.

“The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born”. This paper will focus on the first part of this famous dictum by Antonio Gramsci. Since the 1980s advanced capitalist democracies have gone through an age of neoliberalism. Governments reformed their economies to expand market relations in areas previously reserved for democratic and collective decision-making. Yet, since about 2020 signs are accumulating of state interventions that do not conform to neoliberalism: a gradual retreat from globalization and increased steering of markets rather than by markets. The new policy trends respond to a range of challenges, such as economic and energy crises, a changing geopolitical environment, including the increased risk of war, and the climate crisis. In addition, populist parties and their voters exert political pressure on governments to go beyond the neoliberal paradigm. This paper will draw on Karl Polanyi and neo-Marxist theory to develop a historical explanation of the decline of neoliberalism. It will argue that this decline is not a result of the strength of the Left, but rather of the weakness of the political representation of labour. By the same token, the end of neoliberalism is not what its left-wing critics hoped for.

In climate politics, one particular discipline plays a major role: economics. Norwegian expert commissions on climate policy have not merely been dominated by economists; every single one has framed climate change in economistic terms, as a market failure and a negative externality. This framing has very direct implications for which solutions come into view: internalizing the externalities by raising the carbon price, introducing emissions trading schemes, and so on. Drawing on Rahel Jaeggi’s typology of problems (2013; 2023), I argue that this leads us to treat what are in fact second-order problems (with our form of life) as first-order problems (for our form of life). The upshot is that a problem calling for a revised conceptual framework, a new normative self-understanding, and greater reflection on the form of life itself is instead given a technocratic fix. 

Citizen science, or participatory science, uses the labour and expertise of volunteers to serve the needs and interests of professional scientists. Several authors have suggested that citizen science is or can be exploitative, pointing to a lack of adequate remuneration and lack of free and informed consent. However, these arguments are based on an overly narrow and simplistic understanding of exploitation. In this paper, I draw on political philosophy to provide a more substantial account of exploitation in citizen science. The result is a delineation of the conditions under which citizen science is exploitative and, as a correlate, an understanding of strategies to avoid and address exploitation in citizen science.

In this paper, I propose an approach grounded in critical theory for researching the contemporary far right. Specifically, the paper unpacks and pushes back against a liberal hegemony at the heart of most scholarship on contemporary far-right politics, exploring what it might look like to instead analyze current trends in far-right politics using the key ideas from critical theory. In building towards a research framework that not only interprets but adequately confronts growing far-right movements, I consider how liberal legacies constrict the research methods and ethics of contemporary social sciences: hindering militant research agendas, normalizing a liberal status quo, while simultaneously feeding far-right actors. In doing so, the paper invites students of critical theory to reassess the meaning of praxis and engaged research at a time when we are witnessing the resurgence of far-right politics globally. If ‘the point is to change the world,’ then how should scholars respond to an increasingly rightwing context shaping both society and the research process? In what ways might they pursue research in solidarity with those targeted by far-right politics? And what liberal biases hinder their ability to react adequately to today’s far-right resurgence? Ultimately, the paper argues that, in an era when academics can either help or hinder the far right, research must move beyond the liberal hegemony within far-right studies, reorient itself with the longstanding insights of critical theory, and embrace an activist scholarship that works in service to social justice and is embedded in communities of resistance.

This paper examines the critical and emancipatory potential of utopia through contemporary art, focusing on John Knight’s permanent installation The right to be lazy (2007/2009) at Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin, which draws on Paul Lafargue’s (1883) praise of laziness and his critique of the conception of man as a producer and master over nature. Against a present marked by intertwined ecological, social, and economic crises, it develops a materialist conception of utopia not as a future ideal but as an immanent perspective within the present. Drawing on Gaston Bachelard (1942, 1948) and Ernst Bloch (1954), utopia is understood as a mode of attention to latent possibilities emerging through practices of negation that suspend the imperatives of productivity and control.

Central to this account is Rahel Jaeggi’s (2018) notion of critique as operating within forms of life while resisting them, a paradox materialized in the artwork’s gesture of “letting be” as a form of immanent critique. The figure of the “weed” becomes key to this perspective: embodying persistence, contingency, and non-conformity, it points toward forms of collective existence that exceed both instrumental rationality and fixed identities.

By foregrounding utopia as a sensibility for the not-yet within the here and now, the paper proposes aesthetic practices as sites where alternative modes of living can be rehearsed. In this way, art contributes to articulating perspectives for a future beyond the impasses of the present, grounded in the reactivation of shared capacities.

This presentation argues that there is a utopian dimension of punishment and suggests a framework to analyse it. The idea is that there might be something emancipatory in the demands to punish, also in a social context in which punishment as an institution is inimical to social justice on most accounts. In the cases discussed here, Influential actors motivated the violence and the condemnation by ideas that went beyond the confines of the law and contained the embryo to a society in which everyone would get their fair share of suffering and opportunity. That is the concrete utopian dimension of punishment, in Bloch’s sense. Individual acts of punishment simultaneously foreboded and effectuated a future societal order that was already in the making. Social justice may well be impossible to realise through punishment. Yet the anticipation of social justice embedded in punishment could sustain rather than disrupt emancipatory processes, on condition that it is addressed as such, as a striving toward a better life. That is the critical-theoretical potential of the utopian dimension of punishment. So, we need to acknowledged the implicit and sometimes muddled ideas of social justice that go into popular demands of harsh punishment – thereby making them accessible to discussion, reflection and clarification.

In my talk, I will discuss whether equating progress with new rights is a worthwhile approach in political struggles, considering the multiple crises we’re facing today. My main interlocutor is Christoph Menke. In Kritik der Rechte (2015), Menke argues that rights, because of their very form, are doomed to engender contradictions and crises that it cannot solve with its own means. Menke retells the story of how social welfare rights originated from the need to compensate for capitalist domination made possible by formal private rights. Yet, social welfare rights undermined the individual freedom they came to restore because of their inherent tendency to discipline and normalize subjects according to a narrow notion of the good life. This gives rise to a cycle of domination, in which capitalist exploitation and normalization mutually reinforce one another. Whereas Habermas’ way out of this deadlock was to rethink the co-originality between private and political autonomy, Menke argues that we should replace the concept of rights with a new concept of counter-rights [Gegenrechte], meant to protect the pre-conceptual, affective moment in political judgments from reification. I argue that Menke’s concept of counter-rights repeats the same mistakes he attributes to classical subjective rights (naturalization). Nonetheless, I make the case that his concept of counter-rights touches on an indispensable part of radical politics that can be adapted to a refined version of discourse theory of democracy, more attuned to differences of perspectives and modes of participation.