We meet in Knox Hall. If you are interested in attending, please email Teddy and we will send you a calendar invite with all the details and the papers we will discuss. If you aren’t affiliated with Columbia, let us know and we can help make sure you have building access.
September 30th, 2026 from 1:30PM – 3PM:
In our first session, we will be discussing Banerjee’s necrocapitalism in conversation with Mbembe’s necropolitics. Necropolitics expands on Foucault’s concept of biopower to theorize how states use social political power to determine who is allowed to live and who must die. The theory of necrocapitalism builds on this concept to theorize contemporary forms of organizational accumulation that involve dispossession and the subjugation of life to the power of death. How do different forms of power — institutional, material, and discursive — operate in the political economy and the violence and dispossession that result?
October 28th, 2026 from 1:30PM – 3PM:
Both readings take up a question at the center of this group’s work: what does it mean to care for, witness, or recognize a life within conditions that have already made that life unlivable? Sharp finds the prison hospice a meaningful, if limited, answer. Hartman’s chapter warns that care, empathy, and recognition offered under domination can make suffering bearable to watch without making life any more livable. Reading them together, we can ask whether a good death can be wrested from a system of domination or whether it becomes one of that system’s tools.
November 18th, 2026 from 1:30PM – 3PM:
This session pairs Vanessa Barker’s exploration of the role of last words with Brian Rappert’s work on counting the dead and accountability. We hope to explore the various ways the social order counts or discounts the dead.