Timetable
N.B. All times are Prague time, which is the same as Berlin, Madrid, Paris and Warsaw, one hour ahead of London and Lisbon, 6 hours ahead of New York and 8 hours behind Tokyo. e.g. noon in Prague is 11am in London, 6am in New York and 8pm in Tokyo.
Friday 22nd October
11:00 – 11:30: Conference opening and welcome
11:30 – 13:00: Direct Action: Justification, Limits and Promises
Chair: Dan Swain
Maarit Laihonen – Prefiguration and utilitarianism: Refining justification of direct action
Darren Webb – Ah Bartleby! The pedagogical (im)potency of Occupy Wall Street
Heather McKnight – Chaos and Hope –Nano-Utopian Moments of Activist Self-Organisation
14:00 – 15:30: Anarchist Prefigurative Politics, Revolution and Utopia 1
Chair: Laurence Davis
Matt York – Permanent Revolution: Utopia as Process
Rhiannon Firth – Disaster: How do disasters of the current conjuncture reconfigure state-capital relations, and how can movements resist without being co-opted?
John Clark – From Prefiguration to Transfiguration: From Monad and Nomad to Communad
16:00 – 17:30: Refusal, Dissent and Withdrawal
Chair: Maarit Laihonen
Ryan Sporer – Politics of Circumvention – Four Theories of Self-Extrication
Anat Ascher – Refusing what we are: political prefiguration in Foucault, Derrida and Rancière
Arnošt Novák – Direct action and the possibilities and limits of radical autonomous politics
18:30 – 20:00: Keynote 1:
Matthijs van de Sande – To Stand for Something: Prefiguration and (Political) Representation
Saturday 23rd October
9:30 – 11:00: Gender Abolition and Everyday Prefiguration
Chair: TBC
Michaela Fikejzová – Abolish Gender! as a Case of Linguistic Everyday Prefiguration
Lila Braunschweig – The future and the trivial: Utopias of gender abolition and the specter of difference in French materialist feminist thought
Matthew Wilson – Everyday prefiguration: bringing the personal into our praxis
11:30 – 13:00: Confronting the Climate Crisis
Chair: Joe Grim Feinberg
Peter Cox – What if there were no cars? Connecting Cyclovia and Covid-19 lockdowns as prefigurative political mobility spaces for a degrowth world
Jakub Kowalewski – “For the form of this world is passing away” Reinterpreting Paulinian as if in light of the climate apocalypse.
14:00 – 15:30: Prefiguration and Municipalism – in and against the state
Chair: Yuliya Moskvina
David Webb – Taking back control? Prefiguring neighbourliness and environmental survival in Wingrove
Imrat Verhoeven, Michael Strange & Gabriel Siles-Brügge – All Politics is Local! Conceptualising municipal resistance
Raquel Sobral Nonato & Mario Aquina Alves – Prefigurative Politics ‘inside’ the government? A case study about Solidarity Economy in Brazil
16:00 – 17:30: Anarchist Prefigurative Politics, Revolution, and Utopia 2
Chair: Laurence Davis
Benjamin Franks – Capitalist Prefiguration: Learning lessons from the pest
Beatriz Alejandra Paz Jiménez – Revolutionary Practices of the Original Peoples from the North America Region in the Aftermath of NAFTA
Laurence Davis – The Angel and the Porcupine: Anarchist Prefigurative Politics, Revolution, and Utopia
18:00 – 19:30: Keynote 2:
Davina Cooper – DIY law reform: Gender politics and the challenge of experimental law
Sunday 24th October
09:30 – 11:00: (Re)Thinking Present and Future
Chair: Petr Kouba
Madina Tlostanova and Tony Fry – Towards a New Political Imagination
Hugo Radice – Dignity is not enough: contributive justice in a society of equals
11:30 – 13:00: Roundtable discussion on Marxism and Prefiguration
Brecht De Smet, Paul Raekstad, Dan Swain
14:00-15:30: Comparative View of Women in Prefiguration: From Societies in Movement to Chiapas and Rojava
Anna Rebrii – Education and Knowledge Production as a Prefigurative Practice in Chiapas and Rojava
Emre Sahin – Cooperatives and Prefigurative Economy in Rojava and Chiapas
Marina Sitrin – Prefigurative Societies in Movement: From Argentina to the Movements of the Squares
16:00 – 17:30: Prefiguration and Organising Strategy
Chair: Matt Wilson
Lara Monticelli – On the Necessity of Prefigurative Politics
Claudia Firth – Polyp Labour: Prefiguration, Scale and Strategy
Ashley Bohrer – How Is It To Be Done: Dilemmas of Prefigurative and Harm-Reduction Approaches to Social Movement Work
18:00 –19:30: Keynote 3:
Paul Raekstad – Winning a Green New Deal
Monday 25th October
11:30 – 13:15: Politics and the ‘as if’
Chair: Anat Ascher
Ng Qian Qian – Notes towards a Performative Theory of National Identity
Maxim van Asseldonk – Prefiguring the People: Constituent Power in a Prefigurative Key
Michael Zangerl – Dissensual prefigurations. Jacques Rancière and the various politics of the “as if”.
14:00 – 15:45: Utopia and Hope
Chair: Peter Cox
William Paris – Whither Utopia?: Marcus Garvey and the Contradictions of Black Nationalism
Sergio Martin Tapia Arguello and Monica Soares – Utopia and Prefiguration: Marx, Marxism and the upsurge of manifold utopian conceptualisations.
Javier Toscano and Sanaz Azimipour – Migrant Nation, Deconstructing Nostalgia, reorganising hope
Alenna Lynn Roth – ‘What if tomorrow never comes?’ – Considering the social-psychological factors for social transformation through Ernst Bloch’s Principle of Hope
16:00-17:30: Writing the Past and Generating the Future
Chair: Beatriz Alejandra Paz Jiménez
Kimberly Croswell – Putting the Word Out There: sub.Media, the Generative Prefiguration of Arts-Activist Resistance
Rachael Kiddey – “Made in Migration”: using prefigurative practice to co-curate a public heritage exhibition on the material culture of forced displacement in contemporary Europe
Thembi Luckett – Hope in the Shadow of Coal: Exploring Reproductive and Transformative Hopes in Everyday Life
19:00-20:30: Anarchist Prefigurative Politics, Revolution and Utopia 3
Chair: Laurence Davis
Nathaniel Andrews – Anarchism in Everyday Life: Libertarian Prefigurative Politics in Spain and Argentina, 1890-1930
Carissa Honeywell – Between reform and revolution: prefiguration as a guide for action
Wayne Price – Two Anarchist Conceptions of Prefiguration and Revolution