Contribution short abstract

This roundtable contribution examines the importance of anti-oppression critical theoretical poetics for holding radical space against panic liberalism, for unsettling social scientology, and for anti-imperialist movement building against global apartheids.

Contribution long abstract

My contribution to this roundtable discussion responds to the three questions posed:

1) Our role in times of genocide: Building on my experience a member of the Faculty 4 Palestine Collective and as a vice chair of the University of Alberta’s Race Equity Council, responding to anti-EDI campaigns, I will offer an overview of my ongoing subaltern movement oriented research and teaching praxis involving regenerative molecular media which seek to radicalize the pluriversal turn in the social sciences so that it does not regress into mere cultural relativism and diversity-of-oppressions management by new formations of panic liberalism.

2) Unsettling onto-theological and epistemic hegemonies: In order to delink from the colonizers’ model of the world, I argue, we need the historiographical poetics of anti-oppression critical theory (which theorizes historically, in media res), its genealogical hermeneutics of skepticism (which investigates which oppression a given theory or concept descends from as its rationalization) and its mycelial decompositional-regenerative poetics of theorizing (which places names given to the world by masters and authorities under mycelial “erasure” and invents new names through intermedia research-creation).

3) Moving beyond paralysis: No environmental or social justice is now possible without anti-fascist mass movements and yet the social engineering of anti-fascist popular culture by Gutenberg experts is by definition impossible. Consequently, moving beyond paralysis requires speculative molecular media building on the anti-imperialist critical-theoretical traditions of the global south if we are to escape the dead ends of north-centred minimalist nowtopias, green new deals and ongoing imperialist war.