Oppression, Solidarity, Resistance

Maša Mrovlje is currently examining the political potential of disappointment within the modern revolutionary tradition of political thought. The project explores how an engagement with past disappointments can help us confront the challenges involved in resisting oppression and reanimate resistance in the present era of disillusion. In addition to existential, Marxist and postcolonial theoretical sources, it draws on practical insights from the 2011 Egyptian Revolution.

This collaborative project - undertaken by Maša Mrovlje and Jennet Kirkpatrick - seeks to foreground women’s experiences of resistance that have been neglected in dominant theories of resistance. We seek to contest a masculine imaginary that continues to take shape in a variety of forms of resistance, from armed liberation struggle, to theories of the strike and civil disobedience.

This book project - undertaken by Charles des Portes - analyzes the coloniality of freedom and creates an alternative understanding of freedom based on Hannah Arendt’s and Frantz Fanon’s phenomenologies. The argument is that Western conceptions of freedom, by being purely subject-centred, are often rooted in symbolic and/or material appropriations. Against that, Charles is suggesting a threefold understanding of freedom as 1/ ontological resistance, 2/ an-archic mode of organisation, and 3/ that freedom precedes liberation.

Charles des Portes has also been working on building up a decolonial existential political theory and a decolonial phenomenological approach based on authors such as Frantz Fanon and Aimé Césaire.

Charles des Portes' future project will analyse the philosophical foundations of racial capitalism and its reproduction.