Uncertain States - DISCOURSES Nikita Dhawan: "Yet Again! The Self-Barbarization of Europe"

Nikita Dhawan is Professor of Political Theory at the University of Innsbruck. She was the spokesperson of the working group „politics and gender“ of the German Association for Political Science and is as well a member of the directorate of the Cornelia Goethe Centrum for Women’s studies. She will combine the results of her research with the speech about the „Self-Barbarization“ of Europe.

Nikita Dhawan is Professor of Political Science (Political Theory and Gender Studies) and Director of the Research Platform Gender Studies: „Identities – Discourses – Transformations“ at the University of Innsbruck, Austria. She has held visiting fellowships at Universidad de Costa Rica (2013); Institute for International Law and the Humanities, The University of Melbourne, Australia (2013); Program of Critical Theory, University of California, Berkeley, USA (2012); University of La Laguna, Tenerife, Spain (2011); Pusan National University, South Korea (2011); Columbia University, New York, USA (2008).

Her publications include: Impossible Speech: On the Politics of Silence and Violence (Academia: 2007); Hegemony and Heteronormativity: Revisiting “the Political” in Queer Politics (co-ed., Ashgate: 2011); Decolonizing Enlightenment: Transnational Justice, Human Rights and Democracy in a Postcolonial World (ed., Barbara Budrich: 2014); Postcolonial Theory: A Critical Introduction (with Maria do Mar Castro Varela, in German; transcript: 2015); Global Justice and Desire: Queering Economy (co-ed., Routledge: 2015); Negotiating Normativity: Postcolonial Appropriations, Contestations and Transformations (co-ed., Springer: 2016).

DISKURSE, a series of lectures and discussions, addresses today's key issues. Europe is facing challenges such as xenophobia, Islamophobia and anti-Semitism. What are the causes of this new fundamentalism? How can the growth of right-wing populism and racism be curbed and overcome? How can immigration policies be improved? And what role does art have to play in coping with the crisis?

The 12 lectures by prominent representatives of migration studies, political science, sociology, philosophy, and art scholarship will be accompanied and commented on by the young team from Polis180, the grassroots think tank for foreign and European policy. The series will be available online at www.adk.de/uncertain-states.

In cooperation with the German Federal Agency for Civic Education (bpb) and Polis180. All dates of the series can be found here.