Annual theme “Excess“
Interdisciplinary Lecture Series (WS 2019/20)

23 October 2019

Excess and Devaluation

Silvia Federici (via Skype), Amy Franceschini, Jason W. Moore

Silvia Federici (via Skype)

Silvia Federici is a long-time feminist activist, teacher and writer. In 1991 she was one of the founders of the Committee for Academic Freedom in Africa and has been active in the anti-globalization movement and the anti-death penalty movement. Federici is the author of many essays on political philosophy, feminist theory, cultural studies, and education. Her published works include: Revolution at Point Zero (2012); Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation (2004); A Thousand Flowers: Social Struggles Against Structural Adjustment in African Universities (2000, co-editor), and Enduring Western Civilization: The Construction of Western Civilization and its 'Others' (1994 editor). Her newest book Re-enchanting the World: Feminism and the Politics of the Commons (2018) provides a detailed history and critique of the politics of the commons from a feminist perspective. She is Emerita Professor at Hofstra University (Hempstead, New York).

Amy Franceschini (Sound and Power-Point Presentation)

Amy Franceschini is the founder of Futurefarmers, a group of artists, activists, farmers and architects with a common interest in creating frameworks of participation that recalibrate our cultural compass. Their work uses various media to enact situations that disassemble habitual apparatus; public policy, urban planning, educational curricula and public transportation plans. Futurefarmers produce relational sculptures and tools for people to gain insight into deeper fields of inquiry – not only to imagine, but also to participate in and initiate change in the places we live. Amy’s work has been exhibited at the Guggenheim Museum in New York, the Whitney Biennial in New York, MOMA, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, The Canadian Center for Architecture in Montreal, the 2014 Venice Architectural Biennale and she is the recipient of a 2010 Guggenheim Fellowship and a 2019 Rome Prize Fellow in Design. She received her MFA in New Genres from Stanford University in 2002 and her BFA in Photography from San Francisco State University in 1992.

Jason W. Moore

Jason W. Moore is an environmental historian and historical geographer at Binghamton University, where he is professor of sociology. He is author or editor, most recently, of Capitalism in the Web of Life (Verso, 2015), Anthropocene or Capitalocene? Nature, History, and the Crisis of Capitalism (PM Press, 2016), and, with Raj Patel, A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things (University of California Press, 2017). His books and essays on environmental history, capitalism, and social theory have been widely recognized, including the Alice Hamilton Prize of the American Society for Environmental History (2003), the Distinguished Scholarship Award of the Section on the Political Economy of the World-System (American Sociological Association, 2002 for articles, and 2015 for Web of Life), and the Byres and Bernstein Prize in Agrarian Change (2011). He coordinates the World-Ecology Research Network.