Network Leaders

Together Viktoria and Clare bring internationally recognised expertise and publications in political theory and critical theory – specifically authoritarianism, democracy, state theory, and populism.

Viktoria Huegel

Viktoria Huegel, BA (Heidelberg University), MA and PhD (University of Brighton) with the dissertation “From Authority to Authoritarianism and back again”: Max Weber, Carl Schmitt and Hannah Arendt” (supervisors: Mark Devenney, Clare Woodford; examiners: Bonnie Honig, German Primera Villamizar). 2022-2023 research assistant at the Institute for Political Science, Heidelberg University. 2018-2022 school tutor in the School of Law, Politics and Sociology, Sussex University; 2019 visiting researcher at the Rhetorics department, UC Berkeley.

Since October 2023, I am a post-doctoral researcher in the subproject “Culture – Pre-enacting Democratic Spaces” of the ERC project “Prefiguring Democratic Futures. Cultural and Theoretical Responses to the Crisis of Political Imagination (PI: Oliver Marchart). The aim is to investigate how activists reclaim the physical and symbolic space of the theatre in order to experiment with democratic forms of self-organisation and to open an artistic space of imagination. Together with Dr. Clare Woodford (University of Brighton), I also lead the AHRC research network “Wellbeing State” bringing together international researchers and policy makers to imagine and actualise welfare state politics for the 21st century.

My expertise lies in radical democratic theory and German Political Thought of the 20th century. My first book “From Authority to Authoritarianism and back again” develops a post-foundational concept of authority to defend democratic institutions and procedures against their undermining by new authoritarian politics. For that, it critically examines the concept of authority in the work of Weber, Schmitt, Arendt drawing on post-structuralism, Black radicalism and the philosophy of translation.

Research interests

Political theory, radical democracy, new authoritarianism, 20th century German Political Thought, political order and disorder

Selected Publications

 

Clare Woodford

Clare Woodford is Principal Lecturer in Political Philosophy in the Centre for Applied Philosophy, Politics and Ethics (CAPPE)  School of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Brighton; director of the CAPPE Critical Theory research group strand; School Doctoral Studies Lead; and Principal Director for the AHRC Wellbeing State Research Network. She has published widely on democratic theory, populism, violence and polarization, and their application in politics and policy, drawing on the politics of care, gender theory, aesthetics, and ethics. Her book Disorienting democracy: politics of emancipation (2017, Routledge) juxtaposed Rancière’s thought with that of Butler, Cavell, Menke and Derrida to draw out the practical implications of Rancière’s writing for democratic political strategising. Her collaboration with Adriana Cavarero, Judith Butler, and Bonnie Honig, Towards a Feminist Ethics of Nonviolence (co-edited with Tim Huzar, 2021, Fordham) brings these thinkers into conversation with other leading feminist and gender theorists to argue that we need to attend more carefully to political infrastructural organisation if we are to construct a more democratic, less violent world.

Clare’s work currently evaluates how we might strengthen democracy to oppose authoritarianism, extremism, and right wing populism via a reworking of the democratic welfare state in the 21st C language of wellbeing.  An important subtheme of this involves understanding the role of affect (e.g. love, rage, grief) in contemporary democratic movements for social justice, both online and in the streets.

Clare’s research is primarily motivated by concern about the relationship between inequality and violence and unrest and how we can design feasible but socially just policies to respond to these in advanced capitalist democracy. Working at the interstices of ethics, aesthetics, poststructuralism, democratic, and gender theory, she is fascinated by concepts of social order and disorder; finitude and the edges of being and knowledge; the inter-play of faith, reason, perception, belief and action; and the varied ways in which social animals communicate with one another and both make themselves (or fail to make themselves) understood and how we seek (or fail to seek) to understand others.

Clare welcomes inquiries for doctoral research and is available to supervise PhDs in any area related to her work. Please email enquiries to c.woodford@brighton.ac.uk.

Selected Publications
Books –

Woodford, C. with Huzar T. (2021) (ed.) Towards a Feminist Ethics of Nonviolence with Adriana Cavarero, Judith Butler, Bonnie Honig, and other voices, New York: Fordham University Press.

Woodford, C. (2017) ‘Disorienting democracy: politics of emancipation’, London: Routledge.

 

Articles/chapters –

Woodford, C. (2024) ‘Don’t mind the gap! Democracy, the crowd, and popular sovereignty, or when Lefort met Hans Christian Anderson’ in L. Koczanowicz, and W. Ufel (ed.s) Democracy and aesthetics, New York and London: Brill.

Woodford, C. (2024) ‘Populism, impossible time, and democracy’s ‘people’ problem’, in A. Knott (ed.) Populism and Time, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

Bentley, M. and C. Woodford (2023) ‘Beyond Reproach? Rawls, Cavell and Emersonian Conversation as a New Model for Democratic Counter-Radicalisation Policy’, Journal of International Political Sociology, 17:1.

Woodford, C. (2023) ‘Too left-wing or not populist enough? Using Laclau and Mouffe to rethink Corbynism and future left strategy in the UK’ Journal of British Politics, 18: 81-102.

Woodford, C. (2023) ‘Refusing Post-truth with Butler and Honig’, Journal of Philosophy and Social Criticism, 49:2, 218-229.

Woodford, C. (2023) ‘Cavarero’s Puzzle: ethics, maternity and loving “wrong”’, Italian Journal of Philosophy, accepted and in press.

Devenney, M. and Woodford, C. ‘Democracy beyond the pale: the paradox of democratic theory’, Journal of Philosophy and Social Criticism in review.

Woodford, C. (2022) ‘Marx, Democracy and Magic, in From missed opportunities to future possibilities, Towards an Improper Politics’, Contemporary Political Theory, Vol. 21, pp.443-474.

Woodford, C. (2021) ‘Judith Butler’ in Choat, S. and Ramgotra, M. (ed.s) Reconsidering Political Thinkers, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Woodford, C. and Devenney, M. (2021) ‘Laclau and Rancière’ in Stagnell, A. and Payne, D. (ed.) Populism, the logic of revolts or a revolt against logic?, London: Bloomsbury.

Woodford, C. (2019) ‘Populismo Deseante: notas sobre mascarada, subjetividad y emancipación para la política populista’, in Ema Lopez, P and Ingala Gomez, E. Populismo y hegemonía: retos para la política emancipatoria, I. Presupuestos teóricos.Madrid: Lengua de Trapo.

Woodford, C. ‘The People Do Not Exist!’, Interfere, 12th June 2020, Brighton: University of Brighton.

Woodford, C. (2019) ‘Hatred and Democracy? Populism in Europe’ in R. Feenstra, and Fominaya, C. (ed.s) The Routledge Handbook of Contemporary European Social Movements, London and New York: Routledge.

Woodford, C. ‘Has Democracy Failed Women?’, Broad Agenda, 2nd August, 2018.

Woodford, C. and Devenney, M. ‘Why the US and Britain are not Democracies’ The Conversation, 20th January 2017,

Woodford, C. (2016) ‘Subjects of Subversion: Butler and Rancière on performing politics’ Response to Judith Butler. in Alliott, J. Pauker, M. and Street, A. (ed.s) Conversations and Crossings in Performance Philosophy, London: Palgrave.

Woodford, C. (2015) ‘Modes of Dreaming and Doing – Jacques Rancière and strategies for a new left’; Journal of Philosophy and Social Criticism vo.41, no.8, pp.811-36.

Woodford, C. (2014) ‘Perspectives of ‘Foreignness’’: Honig’s humanism and democratic subjectification’ Contemporary Political Theory, Vol.13, no. 2, pp.175-183.

Woodford, C.  (2013) ‘From Nora to the BNP: Implications of Cavell’s Critique of Rawls, British Journal of Politics and International Relations, vol.15, no.4, pp.586-609.

Woodford, C. and Owen, D. (2012) ‘Cavell, Foucault and the Ethics of Democracy’ Iride, Vol.XV, no.66, May-August 2012, pp.299-366.