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:
This session pairs Lesley Sharp’s ethnography of a prison-based hospice program with Achille Mbembe’s foundational 2003 essay on necropolitics. Reading Sharp alongside Mbembe raises a central question: what does it mean to attend to the dying within an institution designed to reduce populations to the status of the living dead?
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.