Conference Agenda

This talk addresses the thorny issue of complicity in recent global reckonings of political violence (structural racism; histories of colonialism, slavery and genocide; populism; extremism etc.) and asks: What does it mean to educate students for anti-complicity and resistance, when they are embedded in institutions and practices that engage in political violence, as perpetrators, collaborators or bystanders? What are the risks of a pedagogy and politics that cultivate affective practices of anti-complicity in the classroom? Drawing on recent insights from affect theory and political thought, this talk focuses on affect and its role in facilitating critical and political engagement of students and educators with violence. In particular, it interrogates how thinking about complicity through an affective and political lens can help address past and present instances, practices and structures of political violence. It is argued that the development of an anti-complicity pedagogy and politics provides a nuanced way to teach and learn about political violence and its entanglement with histories of suffering and injustice.