Wendy Brown Research Articles

On Gathering: Or, The Birth of Global Fiction from the Spirit of Tragedy

AbstractThis article examines how certain works of global fiction have conceived of their ethical and political agency through the form and act of gathering. Discussions of the global novel's relationship to collective life have often adapted the ideas of Benedict Anderson in order to suggest that contemporary fiction extends “imagined community” from the nation to the globe. Yet political theorists such as Wendy Brown have shown how global economic integration under neoliberalism comes at the price of national social disintegration. In search of a collective imaginary outside the terms of global integration and nationalist resurgence, this article looks to the 1930s (rather than 1990s) as an origin point for global fiction, finding in “British” works attuned to the disintegration of the liberal world-system a model of fiction's agency relevant for neoliberal times. Works by Mulk Raj Anand, Virginia Woolf, and, later, Zadie Smith respond to social and political disintegration by insisting upon fiction's capacity to gather together a disparate audience; and they suggest how gatherings afford an unbounded, eventual, and non-sovereign arrangement of collective life within the ruins of global modernity.

Listening to Black lives matter: racial capitalism and the critique of neoliberalism

This article explores left critiques of neoliberalism in light of the Black Lives Matter movement’s (BLM) recourse to the notion of ‘racial capitalism’ in their analyses of anti-Black oppression. Taking a cue from BLM, I argue for a critical theory of racial capitalism that historicizes neoliberalism within a longue duree framework, surfacing racialized continuities in capitalism’s violence. I begin by revealing how neo-Marxist and neo-Foucaultian approaches to neoliberalism, particularly that of David Harvey and Wendy Brown, respectively, partition race from the workings of contemporary capitalism. Such analyses obscure neoliberalism’s differential impact on non-white racialized populations, while simultaneously casting anti-racist struggles as divisive. In contrast, I then trace how the Movement for Black Lives policy platform invokes Cedric Robinson’s work on racial capitalism, investigating the utility of this framework for the movement’s demands. Building on BLM’s turn to the concept of racial capitalism, I finally offer an outline of a critical theory of racial capitalism to better theorize neoliberalism. By historicizing neoliberalism within racial capitalism’s historical arc, such a theory unravels the qualitatively different mechanisms through which racialized populations are pressed into circuits of capital accumulation. It also paves the way to move past the entrenched class-versus-identity debate on the American left.

Toleration: Conflict Resolution Method in Pluralist Societies or a Tool of Discrimination?

The article is an extended argument for a positive conception of toleration. First, it examines and ultimately rejects reductive interpretations of toleration proposed by David Heyd and Wendy Brown that stem from deflationary and deconstructive readings respectively. It is argued that deconstructive reading is not satisfactory because it perpetuates and amplifies rather than solves paradoxes of toleration, whereas Heyd’s reading does not recognise the importance of toleration for political processes. The author advocates a normative conception of toleration proposed by Rainer Forst, instead. Such a regime of toleration is based on the right to justification in which everyone affected should participate in delineating its limits as free and equal citizens. This conception not only solves the paradoxes of toleration but also does justice to its political importance.

Crisis, Otherness, Positionality: Thinking Beyond ‘Self and Other’ in Turbulent Times

‘The new walls of Europe reflect crises in Europe’s relation to itself and the world’ (Wendy Brown, Walled States, Waning Sovereignty, preface to the 2017 edition). In Germany, Austria and Switzerland, as elsewhere, populism has been on the rise, and far-right discourse has altered the political landscape. Should we respond with a re-thinking of community or is ‘community’ itself part of the problem? Can an ethics of alterity (which we find in Levinas) help re-define what we understand by community? As early as 1924, in Grenzen der Gemeinschaft, Helmuth Plessner warned that ‘too much’ community, far from being positive in an egalitarian sense, can foster aggressive identity-based ‘us-versus-them’ political sentiment. Plessner, in his major work, Die Stufen des Organischen und der Mensch (1928) develops his idea of ‘positionality’ and what we might describe as looking at human beings as ‘in-between’ creatures, bordering on other animals, connected to each other socially, culturally, politically, but also separate. Plessner is searching for a new way of looking at ‘borders’ — boundaries between connectedness and separation. Almost one hundred years after Plessner’s publications, I will argue that they still offer a valuable perspective on the theme of ‘border’ and one which may help counter the aggressiveness of contemporary western discourse on borders. In my contribution, I will also draw on thinkers from the phenomenological tradition ranging from Bernhard Waldenfels, who has written of the merits of what he calls the ‘Stachel’ of the other, to Emmanuel Levinas’s ethics of alterity.

Ambivalent Promises—Reproductions of the Subject: A Forum on Jacques Derrida’s Specters of Marx after 25 Years, Part IV

Abstract Jacques Derrida delivered the basis of The Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, & the New International as a plenary address at the conference ‘Whither Marxism?’ hosted by the University of California, Riverside, in 1993. The longer book version was published in French the same year and appeared in English and Portuguese the following year. In the decade after the publication of Specters, Derrida’s analyses provoked a large critical literature and invited both consternation and celebration by figures such as Antonio Negri, Wendy Brown and Frederic Jameson. This forum seeks to stimulate new reflections on Derrida, deconstruction and Specters of Marx by considering how the futures past announced by the book have fared after an eventful quarter century. In this fourth group of contributions, Thomas Clément Mercier shows how Derrida’s book, besides questioning reception and influence, yet remains to be read, especially in light of ongoing archival research on Derrida’s engagements with Marx’s writings in seminars from the 1970s; and Paulo Chamon offers a critical assessment of Derrida’s promise of a ‘New International’ by considering how the book spooks itself in such a way as to raise serious questions in regard to sovereignty and subjectivity.

Detours and Deviations of Letter and Spirit: A Forum on Jacques Derrida’s Specters of Marx after 25 Years, Part VI

Abstract Jacques Derrida delivered the basis of The Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, & the New International as a plenary address at the conference ‘Whither Marxism?’ hosted by the University of California, Riverside, in 1993. The longer book version was published in French the same year and appeared in English and Portuguese the following year. In the decade after the publication of Specters, Derrida’s analyses provoked a large critical literature and invited both consternation and celebration by figures such as Antonio Negri, Wendy Brown and Frederic Jameson. This forum seeks to stimulate new reflections on Derrida, deconstruction and Specters of Marx by considering how the futures past announced by the book have fared after an eventful quarter century. In this sixth group of contributions, Jean Tible sketches how spectrality and phantasmagoria continue to animate recent inheritances of both Derrida’s and Marx’s texts so as to inspire novel thought-struggles; Dirce Eleonora Nigro Solis considers Derrida’s engagement with the question ‘Whither Marxism?’ as a politico-philosophical model of deviation that provokes the displacement of Marxian axioms and a renovation of Marxist and deconstructive thinking for the period of neoliberalism; finally, Michael Shapiro traces a different detour in Derrida’s thought and shows that Derrida’s deviant reading of Freud’s construction of repression opens up the past and the archive to non-official constructions of collective history.

Specters of Colonialidade: A Forum on Jacques Derrida’s Specters of Marx after 25 Years, Part V

Abstract Jacques Derrida delivered the basis of The Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, & the New International as a plenary address at the conference ‘Whither Marxism?’ hosted by the University of California, Riverside, in 1993. The longer book version was published in French the same year and appeared in English and Portuguese the following year. In the decade after the publication of Specters, Derrida’s analyses provoked a large critical literature and invited both consternation and celebration by figures such as Antonio Negri, Wendy Brown and Frederic Jameson. This forum seeks to stimulate new reflections on Derrida, deconstruction and Specters of Marx by considering how the futures past announced by the book have fared after an eventful quarter century. In this fifth group of contributions, three philosophers explore the specters of colonialidade, the specifically Brazilian legacies of Portuguese and European coloniality. Carla Rodrigues opens the dialogue by exploring the haunting and melancholy provoked by colonial forms of violence and shows how confronting Brazilian necropolitics sustains the Derridean legacy; Rafael Haddock-Lobo offers a meditation on the difficulties of being before the law and standing before specters as a means of being justly haunted by the others of European philosophy in Brazil; finally, Marcelo Moraes continues the theme of Europe as a specter-producing machine and invokes specifically the presences of indigenous and Afro-Brazilian political resistances with the aim of deconstructing coloniality.

Critical Theory in Times of Crisis

Book Review| March 01 2020 Critical Theory in Times of Crisis Critical Theory at a Crossroads: Conversations on Resistance in Times of Crisis, edited by de Cauwer, Stijn, New York: Columbia University Press, 2018, 256 pages, $35 (paperback), ISBN 9780231186797 Michiel Rys Michiel Rys Michiel Rys is a postdoctoral researcher for the Department of Literary Studies at the University of Leuven. He is currently working on a research project on the history and representation of precarity with a focus on German literature. Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Cultural Politics (2020) 16 (1): 138–140. https://doi.org/10.1215/17432197-8017373 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Michiel Rys; Critical Theory in Times of Crisis. Cultural Politics 1 March 2020; 16 (1): 138–140. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/17432197-8017373 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search nav search search input Search input auto suggest search filter Books & JournalsAll JournalsCultural Politics Search Advanced Search The inflationary use of the term crisis in public discourse and media to pinpoint particular events in the most divergent branches of society (finance and debt, economy, climate, migration, national and supranational political institutions, to name only a few of many examples) should make us suspicious. Critical Theory at a Crossroads deals with these crisis situations, as well as the manifold forms of resistance and theoretical analyses provoked by them. The book consists of eleven interviews with a well-considered sample of established thinkers across a variety of disciplines. Among the interviewees we find Rosi Braidotti, Jacques Rancière, Joseph Vogl, Wendy Brown, Antonio Negri, Tariq Ali, Saskia Sassen, Maurizio Lazzarato, Angela McRobbie, and Jean-Luc Nancy. The book concludes with a letter exchange between Zygmunt Bauman and Roberto Esposito on the latter’s theorem of immunity. In a thought-provoking and engaging introduction, Stijn de Cauwer, the editor... © 2020 Duke University Press2020 Issue Section: Book Reviews You do not currently have access to this content.

Wendy Brown. In the Ruins of Neoliberalism: The Rise of Antidemocratic Politics in the West. New York: Columbia University Press, 2019. Pp. 264. $75.00 (cloth).

Previous articleNext article No AccessBook ReviewWendy Brown. In the Ruins of Neoliberalism: The Rise of Antidemocratic Politics in the West. New York: Columbia University Press, 2019. Pp. 264. $75.00 (cloth).William M. CurtisWilliam M. CurtisUniversity of Portland Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by American Political Thought Volume 9, Number 2Spring 2020 Published in association with the American Political Thought organized section of the American Political Science Association and the Jack Miller Center Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/708297 Views: 294Total views on this site For permission to reuse, please contact [email protected]PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Allegorizing Neoliberalism:

What is neoliberalism? This essay tries to answer this question by drawing upontwo sources: theoretical discussions and literary representations. Michel Foucaultand Wendy Brown argue that neoliberalism is best understood as a new logic ofgovernmentality which has brought into being a new economic subject, homoœconomicus. This article, positioning itself against the main tenets of Foucauldiantheories of neoliberalism, argues that a normative logic of governmentality is aninadequate frame for understanding neoliberal capitalism. In order to understandthe contemporary moment better, we need to historicize neoliberalism and lookcarefully into its relationship with capitalism and class. What we also need tofactor in is how a monetized consumerist worldview has normalized itself inneoliberal culture. When we read contemporary South Asian fictions allegorically,these normalized worldviews and masked relationships begin to come into view.Allegorical presentations of neoliberalism in fictions, this essay hypothesizes,have often taken two different paths: representation of it as a structure of feeling,and parody and critique. A number of contemporary fictions including SamratUpadhyay’s “The Good Shopkeeper” and Amitav Ghosh’s the Ibis trilogy can beread as neoliberal allegories thematizing not only the material alterations thatneoliberalism has ushered in but also the cultural transformations that havebecome parts of our everyday life.

새로운 관계성을 향한 관용에 대한 기독교윤리학적 이해: 웬디 브라운(Wendy Brown)의 관점을 중심으로

한국 사회는 대립과 갈등의 문제를 겪을 때, 구조적 문제를 읽어내기 보다 빠른 봉합책을 제시하려는 경향성을 가져왔다. 한국 교회도 보편적이고 규율적 지위를 내세워 사회의 역동적 관계성들을 교리적인 신앙고백으로 획일화시켜 수용하게 만들어왔다. 여기서 문제는 신앙공동체의 책임적 응답의 구조보다는 사회문제를 개인의 신앙 차원으로 돌려버리는 데 있다. 서구의 관용이란 가치가 한국 사회 내에서도 대립과 갈등의 상황에서 강조되기 시작했는데, 단순히 차이를 수용하는 차원에 그칠 것인지 아니면 변화의 동력이 될지를 점검하는 일은 매우 중요하다. 이를 위해, 후기 자유주의 정치구조를 분석하는 정치철학자 웬디 브라운(Wendy Brown)의 관용에 관한 비판적 이해는 유용하다. 첫째, 관용담론은 차이를 수용하는 수평적 관계성을 강조하는 것 같지만 역설적으로 억압적 규범을 강조하는 구조를 제공할 수 있다. 둘째, 타자를 관리하는 전략이 될 수 있다. 셋째, 제국주의적 관계성을 정당화하여 중심부의 헤게모니를 위협하지 않는 한 타자는 수용되고 관리된다. 넷째, 급진적 변화를 꿈꾸지 않는 한 차이는 관용되어질 수 있다. 바로 이러한 현대 사회의 관용 전략은 차이를 통한 변화의 힘을 통제함으로써, 인간의 보편적 가치를 향한 공동의 투쟁 동력을 사라지게 만든다. 인간의 정치적 삶의 공간이 ‘거버넌스’(governance)라는 경제적 가치와 효율성의 구조에 재단되어 버린다.<BR> 이에 대하여 본 논문은 관용담론에 대하여 기독교윤리학적 시각에서 네가지 비판적 관점을 제시한다. 첫째, 차이는 나와 너의 분리된 구분으로 이해할 것이 아니라 나와 너의 상호관계성으로 이해해야 한다. 둘째, 진정한 연대는 정의와 평화를 향한 특권의 포기를 통해서 이루어진다. 셋째, 인간의 기본가치를 향한 투쟁에서 서로가 자신의 존재가치를 긍정하며 모두가 도덕적 주체로 세워져야 한다. 넷째, 사회적 약자들의 목소리를 차별과 편견 없이 듣는다는 의미에서 관용을 말해야 하며, 사회적 악을 명명해 내는 과제를 수행하는 차원에서 왜곡된 차이의 문제를 다루어야 한다. 그렇다면 관용담론을 넘어서서 새로운 관계성을 설정하기 위한 방법은 무엇일까? 생명의 유기적 관계성으로 나아가는 길, 타자의 경험이 강조되는 길, 용서를 통해 서로가 도덕적 주체로 서는 길을 제시한다. 새로운 관계성을 설정하는 윤리적 과제에 있어서 교회는 그리스도의 몸으로서 도덕적 성찰과 실천의 장이 될 수 있을 것이다. 교회는 보편적 지위를 주장하는 지배적 특권을 포기함으로써, 상호 책임적인 생명의 관계를 열어갈 수 있을 것이다.

Broadcasting the Bieber Republic: A Critical Analysis of “#thatPOWER”

This article provides a critical analysis of “#thatPOWER”—a music video featuring will.i.am and Justin Bieber. This analysis focuses on the tensions and binary oppositions depicted in the video that pertain to social and geographic placement (e.g., “race,” gender, religion). Social science scholarship on youth and Wendy Brown’s account of neoliberalism are drawn on to argue that while “#thatPOWER” emphasizes individual agency and social advancement via will.i.am’s own achievements and aspirations, what is unintentionally promoted is an ironic vision of what we call the "Bieber Republic,” where agency via participatory democracy is erased. “#thatPOWER” neatly serves neoliberalism by tacitly “teaching” that social problems can be solved by individual achievement and mobility secured by inner energy and grit, backgrounded by market competition, consumerism, and technology. In this way “#thatPOWER” is complicit with what Brown calls the “stealth revolution” of neoliberalism.

Postcritique and the Leakiness of Spheres

Postcritique and the Leakiness of Spheres1 Frida Beckman (bio) In the final essay in Elizabeth S. Anker and Rita Felski's edited collection Critique and Postcritique from 2017, Eric Hayot summarizes the status of critique as it has presented itself in this volume: "What we know is that something has been lost, that literary criticism, today, floats adrift on an open, darkling sea, which the sailors search desperately for new compasses" (2017, 279). But what is it that has been lost exactly? I will suggest in this very brief intervention that perhaps it is not critique's usefulness to literary practice that has been lost. Neither, I will propose, is it the political import of critique that has been lost. Rather, I will argue, what are at stake are the forms—the spaces, the spheres—that make critique possible, visible, viable. At least if we follow the Kantian, Arendtian, and Habermasian traditions, critique and the public sphere are inseparable. From this perspective, it makes very little sense to discuss the one without the other. Failing to pay attention to the changing role of the public sphere, I suggest, constitutes a troubling feature of most literary debates on postcritique. As always, there is much more to say about the public sphere and its changing conditions generally and historically but here, and as the debates on postcritique are not only academic but tend also to turn inward, that is, to focus precisely on critique as an academic practice, I will limit myself to saying something about the university and its changing conditions for critique. Historically, the university has been a key space in which a vital public sphere has been fostered. Henry Giroux maintains that higher education is one of an increasingly few public spheres where knowledge and learning promote public values and critical hope (2016, 9). But while the university is thus recognized as harboring a lingering possibility for critique, many, not the least Giroux himself, have also noted how this public sphere is under serious threat. Universities, traditionally crucial spaces for producing critical citizens and the public spheres essential to the democratic ideals [End Page 523] of civic society, are increasingly forced into the instrumental, measurable, and market paradigms characteristic of neoliberal principles. In addition to decreased funding, the diminished influence of faculty, and the intrusion of market mechanisms, Giroux also recognizes the current and unprecedented scope and strength of the attack on higher education "by religious fundamentalists, corporate power, and the apostles of neoliberal capitalism" (6). In the mid-1990s, when middle-brow media suggested that university research was out of touch with the "the demands of the real world," this occurred, Bill Readings argued, primarily because of an "uncertainty as to the role of the University and the very nature of the standards by which it should be judged as an institution" (1996, 1). At this point, the University had gone, Readings maintained, from being "a microcosm of the pure form of the public sphere"—to one that has lost much of this function, becoming, instead, increasingly governed by economic imperatives. In this "posthistorical university," the appeals of rankings and the appeals to "excellence" seem to surpass all other criteria. Since then, the neoliberalisation of universities has, Gregg Lambert notes, continued to pushed U.S. universities from a more industrial—or perhaps disciplinary—model of students passing through programs, classrooms, and offices to students being placed rather "to the side" of the production process, and given the freedom to pick and choose. In this "cafeteria model," as Readings called it, students become customers who are expected to choose and also to be able to determine the criteria for what makes a good choice. Crucially, for the present argument, the university is thus transformed from a place that has previously been seen as somehow separate from society, and as a space that holds a particular expertise that might not always translate directly into its logic, into an increasingly integrated part of a general buffet of neoliberal self-realization. Wendy Brown speaks to this same situation when she notes how scholars in the humanities and the liberal arts find it increasingly difficult to defend their work. The vocabulary of...

Afterwork and Overtime: The Social Reproduction of Human Capital

Afterwork and Overtime: The Social Reproduction of Human Capital

Disobeying Marx, Disobeying Derrida—Hopes &amp; Risks: A Forum on Jacques Derrida’s Specters of Marx after 25 Years, Part II

Abstract Jacques Derrida delivered the basis of The Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, &amp; the New International as a plenary address at the conference ‘Whither Marxism?’ hosted by the University of California, Riverside, in 1993. The longer book version was published in French the same year and appeared in English and Portuguese the following year. In the decade after the publication of Specters, Derrida’s analyses provoked a large critical literature and invited both consternation and celebration by figures such as Antonio Negri, Wendy Brown and Frederic Jameson. This forum seeks to stimulate new reflections on Derrida, deconstruction and Specters of Marx by considering how the futures past announced by the book have fared after an eventful quarter century. In this group of contributions, Aggie Hirst and Tom Houseman, Paulo Cesar Duque-Estrada, Jenny Edkins and Cristiano Mendes reflect on the legacies of Marx and Derrida: on whether Derrida emphasized the wrong Marxian heritage, on the promise and risks of hauntology, on the ghostly potential for justice amidst devastation, and on the paradox of deconstruction’s legacy itself.

The Political Import of Deconstruction—Derrida’s Limits?: A Forum on Jacques Derrida’s Specters of Marx after 25 Years, Part I

Abstract Jacques Derrida delivered the basis of The Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, &amp; the New International as a plenary address at the conference ‘Whither Marxism?’ hosted by the University of California, Riverside, in 1993. The longer book version was published in French the same year and appeared in English and Portuguese the following year. In the decade after the publication of Specters, Derrida’s analyses provoked a large critical literature and invited both consternation and celebration by figures such as Antonio Negri, Wendy Brown and Frederic Jameson. This forum seeks to stimulate new reflections on Derrida, deconstruction and Specters of Marx by considering how the futures past announced by the book have fared after an eventful quarter century. Maja Zehfuss, Antonio Vázquez-Arroyo and Dan Bulley and Bal Sokhi-Bulley offer sharp, occasionally exasperated, meditations on the political import of deconstruction and the limits of Derrida’s diagnoses in Specters of Marx but also identify possible paths forward for a global politics taking inspiration in Derrida’s work of the 1990s.

On the Spectrality of the Inter-state-eal/International: A Forum on Jacques Derrida's Specters of Marx after 25 Years, Part III

Abstract Jacques Derrida delivered the basis of The Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, &amp; the New International as a plenary address at the conference ‘Whither Marxism?’ hosted by the University of California, Riverside, in 1993. The longer book version was published in French the same year and appeared in English and Portuguese the following year. In the decade after the publication of Specters, Derrida’s analyses provoked a large critical literature and invited both consternation and celebration by figures such as Antonio Negri, Wendy Brown and Frederic Jameson. This forum seeks to stimulate new reflections on Derrida, deconstruction and Specters of Marx by considering how the futures past announced by the book have fared after an eventful quarter century. In this third group of contributions, Jessica Auchter, Bruna Holstein Meireles and Victor Coutinho Lage draw broadly on Derrida’s writings to explore the spectrality of the international or inter-state-eal: of politics itself being based on hospitality toward the ghost as foreign guest, of the possibility of enacting a politics of spectrality that might aspire to a new kind of universality, and of how a ‘without international’ might escape the series of prisons that constitutes the international.

“It’s Still Real to Me”: Contemporary Professional Wrestling, Neo-Liberalism, and the Problems of Performed/Real Violence

Beginning from the premise (vis-à-vis wrestler-turned-scholar Laurence de Garis) that professional wrestling scholarship has historically overlooked the embodied, physical dimension of the form in favour of its drama, and reflecting on a series of professional wrestling story-lines that have blurred the lines between staged performance (“kayfabe”) and reality, this article suggests that the business of professional wrestling offers a vivid case study for the rise and dissemination of what political theorist Wendy Brown calls neo-liberal rationality: the dissemination of the market model to every aspect and activity of human life. Drawing on Brown’s work, the language of World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE) contracts, and professional wrestling’s territorial history, this article argues that contemporary story-lines in professional wrestling rationalize, economize, and trivialize the form’s very real violent labour, even rendering audiences complicit in said violence—while serving also as a potent vehicle for understanding the metaphorical (and sometimes literal) violence of neo-liberal rationality more broadly.

Physical activity/exercise and pregnancy – updating knowledge and understanding challenges for guideline development

The aim of the first half of this symposium is to update knowledge of the evidence relating to physical activity (PA) and exercise during pregnancy using an interactive Q and A panel format. In former times, the focus of most guidelines for PA/exercise during pregnancy was on the potential adverse effects on the developing foetus, but today there is much more focus on the benefits of PA/exercise for both the mother-to-be and the baby. But is what we know about exercise in pregnancy based on common sense, or is there high quality research on which to base clear PA/exercise guidelines for both women and their health care providers? What do we really understand about the risks and benefits for the mother, the birth process and the infant? This panel discussion will highlight the complexities of the evidence, and the difficulties of making’one size fits all’ recommendations for all pregnant women. The panel will be chaired by Professor Wendy Brown, who has experience in the development of recommendations on exercise during pregnancy for both athletes and the general population. The panel includes epidemiologists, behavioural and clinical exercise scientists, Dr Gregore Mielke, Dr Gabriela Mena, Ms Tayla Lamerton and Dr Shelley Keating, from the Centre for Research on Exercise, Physical Activity and Health at the University of Queensland. In the second half of this session, A/Prof Lene Haakstad will give an invited presentation on why we should be promoting physical activity during pregnancy to all women.

Critical theory and decolonial possibility in the neoliberal moment

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to consider how practices of critical theorising directed towards present dilemmas of neoliberalisation might inadvertently participate in the reproduction of colonial power.Design/methodology/approachThe paper adopts a critical theoretical approach, focussing on Wendy Brown’s recent work on neoliberalism in particular.FindingsThe paper argues that an alignment with colonial power is evident at a methodological level in Brown’s critique of neoliberalism and that this offers indication of how critical theorising in general might begin to reorient itself in ways that better ally it with the creation/promotion of decolonial possibility in contemporary contexts.Originality/valueThe paper makes original contribution to understanding of how western critical theorising actively participates in the reproduction of colonial power. Its value lies partly in demonstrating how this occurs in Brown’s specific case, and partly in suggesting correctives of more general applicability.