UCLA Political Theory Workshop – 2024/25

Faculty Coordinators: Natasha Piano, Tejas Parasher 

Unless otherwise noted, workshops meet in Bunche Hall 4357 – Friday, 12:15 – 2 pm. Lunch is provided starting at 12 pm.

FALL 2024

October 25, 2024
Speaker: Giulia Sissa (UCLA Department of Political Science, Department of Classics)
Title: Gender Eudaimonism: An Unfinished Project
Discussant: Davide Panagia (UCLA Department of Political Science)

November 8, 2024
Speaker: Paul Taylor (UCLA Department of Philosophy)
Title: “Hattie McDaniel, Stanley Cavell, and (Bette Davis, and John Huston and) the Art of Political Epistemology”
Discussant: Michael Mirer (UCLA Department of Political Science)

November 22, 2024
Speaker: Jeff Guhin (UCLA Department of Sociology)
Title: “Magical Citizenship: A Descriptive Theory of High School Political Formation via Smith, Mill, and Emerson”
Discussant: David Soper (UCLA Department of Political Science)

WINTER 2025

January 31, 2025
2:30 – 4 pm (special time)
Speaker: Mary Caputi (CSU Long Beach)
Title: “Quiet Quitting as Marcusean Refusal.”
Discussant: Pasqualena Brucia Brietenfeld (UCLA Department of Political Science)

February 21, 2025
Speaker: Andrea Robiglio (KU Leuven)
Title: “A View from Nowhere: Raphael Hythlodaeus’ Utopia”
Discussant: Stefania Tutino (UCLA Department of History)

February 28, 2025
Speaker: Davide Panagia (UCLA Department of Political Science)
Title: Sentimental Empiricism: Politics, Philosophy, and Criticism in Postwar France
Discussant: Eleanor Kaufman (UCLA Department of Comparative Literature)

March 7, 2025
2:30 – 4 pm (special time)
Speaker: Kevin Pham (University of Amsterdam)
Title: The Architects of Dignity: Vietnamese Visions of Decolonization
Discussant: TBD

March 10, 2025
5 – 6:30 pm (special time)
Speaker: Steven Klein (King’s College London)
Title: “A Democratic Theory of Labor Unions”
Discussant: TBD

March 14, 2025
Speaker: Qi Jing (UCLA Department of Political Science)
Title: “The State as a Concrete Person: An Organismic Theory with Roots in China.”
Discussant: Josey Tom (UCLA Department of Political Science)

SPRING 2025 

April 11, 2025
Speaker: Anthony Pagden (UCLA Department of Political Science)
Talk: Beyond States: Powers, Peoples, and Global Order
Discussant: Stella Ghervas (UCLA Department of History)

May 2, 2025
Speaker: Vanessa Pooudomsak (UCLA Department of Political Science)
Title: “The Generativity of War Law: Community and Creation through Contest”
Discussant: Qi Jing (UCLA Department of Political Science)

*May 15, 2025: E. Victor Wolfenstein Memorial Lecture in Political Theory*
Speaker: Aziz Rana (Boston College)
Lecture: The Constitutional Bind: How Americans Came to Idolize a Document that Fails Them

May 16, 2025
Speaker: Inés Valdez (Johns Hopkins University)
Title: “Reconsidering the New International Economic Order: The Marxist Dependency Critique and the Politics of Global Injustice”
Discussant: Tomi Kolapo (UCLA Department of Political Science)

May 30, 2025
Speaker: Samuel Bagg (University of South Carolina)
Title: The Dispersion of Power: A Critical Realist Theory of Democracy
Discussant: Blake Emerson (UCLA School of Law)