Presidential Lecture in cooperation with the European Forum Alpbach (EFA)
Opening remarks by Shalini Randeria, President and President, CEU
Comments by Judit Bodnar, Professor Sociology and Social Anthropology, CEU
Abstract: Dissatisfied with identity-based politics, many activists and intellectuals are now seeking larger paradigms that can unify disparate struggles. Aiming to advance that project, I propose that labor forms the hidden link between gender, race, and class. My inspiration is W.E.B. Du Bois’s claim, in Black Reconstruction, that nineteenth century America had two labor movements, anti-slavery and trade unionism, which tragically failed to unite. Extending this idea to the present, I expand it by adding a third. Construing feminism, too, as a labor movement, focused on the work of care, I argue that that capitalist society relies on three distinct types of labor: exploited, expropriated, and domesticated. Their structural entwinement, I maintain, constitutes the inner, systemic ties between gender, race, and class.
Nancy Fraser is the Henry and Louise A. Loeb Professor of Philosophy and Politics at the New School for Social Research. She works on social and political theory, feminist theory, and contemporary French and German thought. A recipient of the American Philosophical Association’s 2010 Alfred Schutz Prize and of the Doctor Honoris Causa from the National University of Cordoba (Argentina), Professor Fraser held a “Blaise Pascal International Research Chair” at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales in Paris in 2008-2010. She has also received fellowships from the Stanford Humanities Center, the Bunting Institute, the ACLS, the Humanities Research Institute at the University of California-Irvine, the Institut für die Wissenschaften vom Menschen in Vienna, the Wissenchaftskolleg zu Berlin, and the American Academy in Berlin. She has taught at Northwestern University, Johann Wolfgang Goethe-Universität in Frankfurt Germany, the University of Paris, the University of Groningen (The Netherlands), and University of the Balearic Islands, Palma de Mallorca.
Registration: https://forms.office.com/e/JzYy9g7Ztg