What is the SSCT?

The Standing Seminar in Critical Theory (SSCT) aims to build a permanent transdisciplinary and inter-institutional space for critical thought across the South West Doctoral Training Partnership institutions. We want to explore critical theories and radical epistemologies, including those born out of both the Frankfurt School and the heterodox Marxist tradition, critical feminist theory and decolonial theory, along with others arising from our own research projects.

The initiative seeks to unite critical theorists within and across the South West Doctoral Training Partnership (SWDTP) institutions, and in dialogue with external partners and organisations. Critical theory, for us, is not simply a set of ideas that can be applied to understand reality. Rather, it is an active, iterative cycle of action and reflection that, embedded in social practices, seeks and enacts social transformation by offering a critique of society.

The SSCT is intended as a transdisciplinary space where students and academic colleagues across the SWDTP can meet to discuss the critical theories and radical epistemologies stemmed from the Frankfurt School and the Marxist tradition, Feminist, and post/de/colonial studies, lies at the intersection of these students’ and academics’ respective subfields and research objects.

The SSCT was born as a student-led initiative by a group of SWDTP doctoral students from the Department of Social and Policy Sciences at the University of Bath, under the guidance of Dr Ana Cecilia Dinerstein.

We were bought together by our interests in theories, epistemologies and practices that build alternatives to the violent and closing world offered by coloniality, capitalism, patriarchy, hetero-cis-normativity and anthropocentrism. Against the tide of the neoliberal University and the neoliberal – white curriculum, we started to discuss the possibility of creating the kind of permanent, cross-disciplinary space for critical thought that we are now making reality.

Following a series of successful “seed” events in 2018 – and thanks to the enthusiastic support from SWDTP Pathway leads from Bath, Bristol and Exeter – in April 2019 the initiative was awarded generous funding for our first year’s activities by the SWDTP Collaboration fund. With this funding, we will now expand our community and activities to incorporate students and academic colleagues at the Universities of Bristol, Exeter and Bath.

Why

Social Sciences are facing a deep crisis. The neoliberal university is in despair. While resistance struggles continue and expand outside academia, critical thought is shrinking, deradicalized or sidelined. We must not only bring back critical theory but also discuss what kind of critical theory is needed today. We must interrogate concepts, methodologies and epistemologies used to accompany radical change.

Previous seminars and activities

• Writing with integrity: publishing strategies for doctoral students (Dr Ana Dinerstein and Dr Sara Amsler):

This session was ran with the aims to to identify the global power dynamics of systems for scholarly writing and publication, to name key dimensions of this power, and recognise their enactment in writing practice.

• Beyond the ‘pink tide’: Is Dependent Capitalism in crisis in Argentina? (Dr Mariano Feliz):

In the seminar, they discussed the Argentine case by focusing on the current economic 'transitional crisis’ and explore the specificity of the Argentinean economy as well as the new forms of social and class conflict that have emerged as a result of this transition.

• Critical theory of hope (Dr Ana Dinerstein):

Ana explores the limitations of contemporary neo Adornian critiques of society and challenges the view that there cannot be a political practice to fought Barbarism. She also suggests that such practice is not only possible but necessary and is being developed at the grassroots level around the crisis of the social reproduction of life.

• Critical Theory in a Violent and Closing World (John Holloway):

At this round-table, the panellists brought critical theory to bear on a contemporary global panorama in which the legitimation of violence, xenophobia, misogyny and racism takes on new and alarming power.

• Hope Beyond Fear (Dr Sarah Vilardo):

This workshop opened an artistic space in the University to reflect in practice about the predicaments of today’s world in dialogue with the “world of hope” that we are trying to build. With key questions including: How can art transcend its micro-world to insert itself into public debates without losing its aesthetic function? How can artistic and academic knowledge work together to produce positive transformation in social relations?

• Free Trade Agreements and Investment Protection: A critical perspective from the Global South (Dr Luciana Ghiotto)

In this presentation and discussion which was ran by Dr Luciana Ghiotto (PhD Buenos Aires, Research Fellow CONICET, Argentina) she took a critical perspective on free trade agreements and investment protection.

• Reformulating the Environmental Crisis: Critial theory symposium:

This first SSCT Symposium interrogated and critiqued the present formulation and reality of ‘environmental’ crisis to propose alternative ideas, views and paradigms that contest the capitalist, colonial and patriarchal order that produces and reproduces the crisis.

• (un)Doing Research: Feminist Decolonial Provocations (Dr Rosalba Icaza):

In this workshop, we explored the conditions for the possibility that emerged for (un)learning when feminists and non-feminist academic-activist Women of Color committed to epistemic justice collectively dealt with two intertwined challenges: the violence of critical thinking and the violence of re-presentation.

• Critical Theory in Pandemic Times (Dr Leopoldina Fortunati):

The pandemic has not only intensified the deep crisis of social reproduction that has made the feminist and social strikes strategic pillars of radical politics today. Moreover, they have made a new common sense of the importance of social reproductive work (now accurately termed ‘essential work’) and, crucially, of the heavily racialised, gendered and classed dimensions of the economies in which it is situated. Fortunati joined us in discussion with Katie Cruz and Camille Barbagallo.