Critical Genealogies Workshop

The Critical Genealogies Workshop provides a space of collaboration and experimentation for theorists from any discipline who deploy genealogy in order to investigate problematizations of the contemporary. We endeavor to take seriously Foucault’s challenges to inherited practices of philosophical critique and propose to take up genealogy to interrogate the history of the present—which differs in important ways from Foucault’s present. Rather than analyzing our present through the lens of those concepts that past genealogies developed for a critique of their own present, we aim to put genealogy to work to diagnose our own present. Working through and with genealogy today means undertaking empirical-theoretical excavations of aspects of a new present.

The main purpose of CGW meetings and sessions is to present genealogical work in progress in order to thematize and reflect on larger questions of research design, strategy, and structure as well as practical questions about conducting genealogical research.