|
I am currently a PhD candidate at The Ohio State University's Comparative Studies Department. I have completed my coursework and candidacy exams. My exam committee was interdisciplinary and diverse:
Philip Armstrong (Committee Chair; Dept. of Comparative Studies): Philip supervised a reading area that had a core and two branches. The core was a set of readings that might be called a genealogy of biopolitics - and included Marx, Arendt, Foucault, and Esposito. The first branch was Autonomous Marxism (mostly Italian Operaismo), and developed the biopolitical core but also had its own consistency. The second branch was another Italian uptake of biopolitics, but with its own tradition and life - the work of Giorgio Agamben. Ultimately, this set of readings brought me to the center of contemporary debates of politics, biopolitics, and radicalism.
Mat Coleman (Geography): Mat and I assembled a reading list that focused on the contemporary conditions of human migration, more specifically the securitization and biopoliticization of refugees and immigrant populations. Broadly speaking, the reading list focused extensively on the US/Mexico border region and the European Union's unique combination of national sovereignty, international law, and border policing practices. Specifically, the reading list focused on specific practices of population policing, border controls, and conceptions of belonging as well as politico-philosophical questions such as: "What is a border?", "Who belongs?", "What is a nation-state?", and others.
Patti Lather (Education/Qualitative Inquiry): Patti graciously elected to remain on my exam committee to supervise a question on radical pedagogy [she was my adviser when I was a PhD student in the School of Educational Policy and Leadership]. This reading list contains three "poles" around which our question revolved: 1) a set of "foundational" critical pedagogy texts, 2) the feminist critique of critical pedagogy, and 3) a set of texts moving beyond critical pedagogy into what I formulated as a radical (anarchist) pedagogy. My basic contention is that both critical pedagogy and its most prominent critiques have 'calcified' and that we need something new. This something new, I argue, comes from contemporary anarchism, where anarchism is viewed as an aspiration and an everyday practice, which opposes it to current notions of critical pedagogy. Fundamentally, any radical pedagogy worth its name must be both anti-capitalist and anti-school.
Leo Coleman (Comparative Studies): Leo served as a reader for the exams and is now an integral member of my dissertation committee.
|
