Learning in Emergency States: Flourishing, Universities, and the Future
A panel discussion with Wendy Brown (IAS, Princeton), Margot Finn (UCL), Eva von Redecker (H-U, Berlin), Sasha Roseneil (Sussex). Convened by Paul Gilroy & John Sabapathy
Learning in Emergency States: Flourishing, Universities, and the Future
05 Jun 2026, 17:30 – 20:00
Universities are in what feels like a state of permanent emergency. Their problems are political, financial, technological, and ethical. Largely nineteenth-century institutions are buckling in twenty-first century conditions.
This panel brings together critical thinkers to diagnose North American, British, and continental European experiences of this crisis. It will explore what is shared, seek what is distinct, and strive to find what will help universities to protect, repair and salvage themselves as emergency defines the normal conditions in which we work.
Image: Albrecht Dürer, Melencolia I, 1514, V&A
Wendy Brown is one of the most influential political theorists of her generation, known for her penetrating analyses of power, neoliberalism, democracy, and the fate of the public good in contemporary political life. Brown is currently the UPS Foundation Professor in the School of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton (as of 2021) and is Professor Emerita of Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley.
Her major works include Undoing The Demos, which argues neoliberalism turns citizens into economic agents, In The Ruins of Neoliberalism, which explains the emergence of populism in response to neoliberal thought and Nihilistic Times: Thinking with Max Weber, which charts a crisis in human values.
Margot is an historian of modern Britain (Britain since 1750), with a predominant focus on the period to 1914. Her previous work has ranged from the history of Victorian popular politics to the gendered legal, social and cultural histories of debt and credit in England. She now researches, teaches and supervises predominantly in topics relating to British colonial and imperial history, with particular emphasis on the family, gender, material culture and transnational encounters. In 2018, UCL Press published an open access volume of essays (co-edited with Kate Smith) from Margot’s Leverhulme Trust-funded research project The East India Company at Home. Her current monograph project is entitled, ‘Imperial Family Formations: Domestic Strategies and Colonial Power in British India, c.1757-1857’.
Eva von Redecker is a Critical Theorist and Feminist Philosopher. She has won Marie-Skłodoska-Curie funding for a project on the authoritarian personality (PhantomAiD), the project will be hosted by the University of Verona, Italy.
Eva's current research focusses on the notion of propertization. She investigates how modern forms of domination and destructiveness hinge on the logics of ownership, and works towards an intersectional account of capitalist oppression.
Eva's most recent book Praxis und Revolution (forthcoming in translation with Columbia University Press) draws on social theory and rich literary examples to explain how radical social change can work despite the rigidity of given structures. According to Praxis und Revolution, revolutions are always processual: they draw from social interstices which prefigure new paradigmatic practices. At the same time, revolutions are materially conditioned: they rely on enabling structural conjectures which allow for transformative transfers to occur.
Sasha Roseneil currently serves as UCL’s Pro-Provost (Equity and Inclusion) and Dean of the Faculty of Social and Historical Sciences. She is Professor of Interdisciplinary Social Science in the UCL Institute of Advanced Studies, and a sociologist, gender studies scholar, psychosocial researcher, a group analyst and psychotherapist. She is a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences and a Principal Fellow of the Higher Education Academy. She is a full clinical member of the Institute of Group Analysis and the UKCP (College of Psychoanalysis and Jungian Analysis), and a founding scholar of the British Psychoanalytic Council.
She was one of the founding editors of the journal Feminist Theory, and is on the editorial boards of Social Movement Studies, NORA: Nordic Journal of Feminist and Gender Research, Women's Studies International Forum, and Amity: The Journal of Friendship Studies.
Paul Gilroy is one of the foremost theorists of race and racism working and teaching in the world today. Author of foundational and highly influential books such as There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack (1987), The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (1993), Against Race (2000), Postcolonial Melancholia (2005) and Darker Than Blue (2010) alongside numerous key articles, essays and critical interventions, Gilroy’s is a unique voice that speaks to the centrality and tenacity of racialised thought and representational practices in the modern world. He has transformed thinking across disciplines, from Ethnic Studies, British and American Literature, African American Studies, Black British Studies, Trans-Atlantic History and Critical Race Theory to Post-Colonial theory. He has contributed to and shaped thinking on Afro-Modernity, aesthetic practices, diasporic poetics and practices, sound and image worlds.
John Sabapathy is Professor of History and works on the comparative history of Europe/Christendom primarily in the twelfth to fourteenth centuries. He also works on the Anthropocene (the period in which humans became geological forces globally), and co-convenes UCL Anthropocene – a major initiative in this area.
His monograph Officers and Accountability in Medieval England, 1170-1300, a study of English officers in a European context, won the Royal Historical Society’s Whitfield Prize for 2015. An edited collection on Individuals and Institutions in Medieval Scholasticism was published in 2020. He is an editor at The English Historical Review.