Workshop Call for Papers
CFP deadline July 14, 2025.
Brighton (UK), 19-20 September 2025
Keynote Speakers:
- K-Sue Parks, UCLA
- Daniel Loick, University of Amsterdam
- Mark Devenney, University of Brighton
Property has always been an important paradigm for the Left in apprehending material and symbolic inequalities in capitalist and political orders and, to an extent, countering these through welfare politics and redistribution. However, a number of traditions have questioned the emancipatory potential of property by focusing on its role in reproducing violent forms of dispossession and domination: from Black radicalism and Black Studies, to Indigenous Studies and decolonial legal scholarship, feminist philosophy and critical theory, Human Geography, democratic theory, and post-Marxism, to name but a few. Scholars have thus picked up the mantle in a long tradition of abolition and turned their scope not just on prison abolition but property abolition to demonstrate what it might mean to live in the afterlives of legal relations of property.
We invite contributions for this workshop to critically investigate the role of property in the imagination of democratic futures and to envision radical alternatives.
Papers might concern but are by no means limited to the following questions and debates:
- In light of new authoritarian developments, what role does the paradigm of property play in new modes of oppression and the experience of marginalisation? In what ways do property regimes limit, rather than enable, political subjectivation and liberation? (Loick 2023, Devenney 2021, von Redecker 2020)
- Is property inherently colonial and racialised in character and interned in projects of dispossession? (Parks 2024, Bhandar 2018)
- What does it mean to live in the afterlives of slavery, as a legal relation of property. (Hartman 2007, 2016, Moten 2003, Wilderson III 2020, Issar 2021, Walcott 2021).
- What are alternative imaginaries of societal relations, beyond property and ownership, e.g., abolitionism, depropertisation, and the commons? (Federici 2004, 2018; Harney/Moten 2018; de Angelis 2017)
This workshop aims to explore the interrelated and interlocking character of these conversations in order to (a) develop robust and rigorous analytical frameworks for conceiving the relationships between property and inequalities, material and social. And (b) critically reflect their implications for Left projects. As such it contributes to and is organised in collaboration with the AHRC Wellbeing State project that reconceptualises welfare state politics for the 21st century.
Submissions:
Please send your submissions to Harrison Lechley (H.J.Lechley-Yuill@brighton.ac.uk) and Viktoria Huegel (Viktoria.huegel@univie.ac.at) indicating your name, title, and affiliation. Submissions should include an abstract of max. 400 words, prepared for anonymous review.
Deadline: July 14, 2025.
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