The return of the subject

Book launch hosted by LSE Cities

This event launched two new books on the society of strangers discussing issues of hyper-subjectivity and desubjectification as the causes of contemporary escalations of violence.

Ash Amin’s Land of Strangers offers a diagnosis of attitudes towards the stranger in the West after 9/11, while Michel Wieviorka’s Evil develops a sociological analysis of evil phenomena presenting us with a fresh approach to the understanding of the darker regions of human behaviour. Both authors were joined by Claire Alexander and Richard Sennett to discuss the analytical challenges posed by the return of the Subject, and the nature of a politics of solidarity. The event was chaired by the incoming Director of the LSE, Craig Calhoun.

 

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Profiles

    Ash Amin

    Ash Amin FBA, CBE, 1931 Professor of Geography and Head of Department, University of Cambridge. Professor Amin is known for his work on race and multiculture, cities, and affective politics. His most recent books include Land of Strangers (Polity, 2012), Arts of the Political (with Nigel Thrift, Duke, 2013), Releasing the Commons (ed. with Philip Howell, Routledge, 2016) and Seeing Like a City (with Nigel Thrift, Polity, 2016). He is a Fellow and Foreign Secretary of the British Academy, Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences, and Foreign Member of the Italian Academia Nazionale Dei Lincei.

    Michel Wieviorka

    President of the Fondation Maison des Sciences de l’Homme and Professor at École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales

    Claire Alexander

    Reader in Sociology, LSE.

    Richard Sennett

    Richard Sennett is Professor of Sociology at the London School of Economics and Political Science, and University Professor of the Humanities at New York University. His research interests include the relationship between urban design and urban society, urban family patterns, the urban welfare system, the history of cities and the changing nature of work. His books include The Craftsman (2008), The Culture of the New Capitalism (Yale, 2006), Respect: The Formation of Character in an Age of Inequality (Penguin, 2003), The Corrosion of Character (1998), Flesh and Stone (1994) and The Fall of Public Man (1977). He is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Royal Society of Literature, the Royal Society of the Arts and the Academia Europea. He is past President of the American Council on Work and the former Director of the New York Institute for the Humanities. Recent honours and awards include The Schocken Prize, 2011; Honorary Doctorate from Cambridge University, 2010; The Spinoza Prize, 2010; The Tessenow Prize, 2009; The Gerda Henkel Prize, 2008; The European Craft Prize, 2008; and The Hegel Prize, 2006.

    Craig Calhoun

    Craig Calhoun is Director and President of LSE. Before joining LSE, he was President of the Social Science Research Council, and taught at the University of North Carolina, Columbia, and NYU where he was most recently University Professor of Social Sciences and Director of the Institute for Public Knowledge. Among his books on politics and social movements are, Neither Gods nor Emperors: Students and the Struggle for Democracy in China and The Roots of Radicalism.