VERONICA GAGO - JUAN OBARRIO
Social Movements and Political Horizons

AFTERNOON COURSE
From Tuesday 4 to Thursday 6, July 2017
2.00 - 4.00 pm

The course will problematize the normative concept of "social movements" presented by recent social science literature. Putting this notion in question we will explore the displacements, discontinuities and ruptures that local political movements and communities have produced in the last two decades. The sessions will focus on three main points ; 1) the apparatus of production of political decision-making; 2) modes of democratization of economic production and 3) the ways in which movements re-organize and re-orient territories and temporalities. The readings will be mostly focused on Latin American experiences, yet they will include as well cases from Africa and Asia, in order to foster a contrapuntal dialogue with current discussions on the category of the Global South.

Verónica Gago teaches at the University of Buenos Aires and at Universidad Nacional de San Martín. She is a researcher at the National Council of Research in Argentina. Her work is deeply influenced by active participation in such experiences as the Colectivo Situaciones and Instituto de Investigación y Experimentación Política (IIEP). Her book Neoliberalism from Below: popular pragmatics and baroque economies is forthcoming in English from Duke University Press (2017). She has published widely on issues of capital, social movements and popular economies.

Juan Obarrio is  Associate Professor of Anthropology at Johns Hopkins University. He holds a PhD fro Columbia University (2007). Obarrio works in the fields of critical theory and political anthropology, focusing on issues of state, democracy, law, violence, magic; and has conducted extensive fieldwork in Southern Africa and South America. He has received fellowships from the MacArthur Foundation, Ford Foundation, Social Science Research Council, and the American Council of Learned Societies, and has been a visiting professor in Paris, Johannesburg, and Buenos Aires. He is the author of The Spirit of the Laws in Mozambique (2014), Corps Etranger (2014), A Matter of Time: A Secret State of Things in Northern Mozambique (forthcoming), and co-editor of African Futures: Essays on Crisis, Emergence, Possibility (2016). In 2016-2017, he will be a member at the Institute for Advanced Study (Princeton), School of Social Sciences.