Past Event

Theorizing Care:
A Humanities Online Reading Course

Session Five|08 JUNE 2023|8-10pm (HKT)

Session
Leader

Adam Muller

Dr. Adam Muller is the Director of the Peace and Conflict Studies graduate programs at the University of Manitoba, Canada. He is also a founding member of the Global Consortium On Bigotry and Hate. He co-edits the journal Genocide Studies International, and researches and teaches on the artistic representation of genocide, war, and human rights.

Dr. Muller is former First Vice-President of the International Association of Genocide Scholars and a Senior Research Fellow with the U of M’s Centre for Defense and Security Studies. In addition to having edited three academic volumes, he curated and authored the critical catalogue for Photrocity: Mass Violence and Its Aftermaths in the Sovfoto Archive, an exhibition of newly-discovered World War Two atrocity photographs. Muller also co-directs the Embodying Empathy project, which gathers together survivors, scholars, and private-sector tech professionals to create an immersive Canadian Indian Residential School in Virtual Reality.

Reading
CARE

Primary Session Reading:

Esposito, R. (2011). Introduction, IV. Biopolitics. In Immunitas: The protection and negation of life. New York: Wiley.

Summary
Review

Published in 2002 as Immunitas: protezione e negazione della vita, Roberto Esposito’s Immunitas fortells new significance in the post-pandemic age. Not only did Covid-19 underscore immunological discourses, but it also made the language of immunity pervasive, even quotidian, as billions of human beings rushed to immunize themselves against the dreaded virus. In our time, immunization stopped being merely metaphorical; it went down to the level of the literal.

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-A Summary Review by Jose Duke Bagulaya with support from Eric Feng

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Reading & Discussion
Notes

Physical torture of the past is being placed by phycological torture on a much larger scale, which is the cause of the trend of insanity, and indiscriminate killing in our community.

Feel free to write down any questions or comments regarding the reading materials for Session 5 HERE.

Session
Annotation

Comment 1

First of all, I would like to say, thank you for this very interesting reading. How do we integrate those that hate us? Adam mentioned about the obligation that we owe each other. I'd like to add some more on that. Actually, one of the chapters in the book is titled compensation. And this is actually a very good idea, because legal compensation happens as a matter of law when two people are creditors and debtors of each other. Their obligations disappear or extinguished. So it's like we no longer owe each other because we are both creditors and debtors in one instance and in another instance. So it's like setting-off, to put it in common law terms. Compensation works like that. If we pursue that discussion on compensation, I guess we might arrive at some practical consequences of the idea of compensation. That's all. Thank you.

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Moments

“We can build a wall high enough to keep the haters. It is, I think, a fantasy, partly because the Wall Building project is a hate project itself.”

The Theorizing Care Session 6 was nothing short of extraordinary!🤝✨ We immersed ourselves in a robust discussion led by our Dr. Adam Muller, exploring some complex concepts like community, immunity, obligation, and contradiction, etc. that take center stage in Roberto Esposito’s Immunitas.

As we discussed topics of divisiveness and hate in some contextual examples, we also came to realize that the polarized positions are often intricately intertwined, and can even converge in ways that invite dialogue 💫. This is actually a ‘political, moral and social question’ that we, as an individual in a certain community, encounter every day. And by pondering what we owe each other, and performing service and obligation, we are actually fostering a spirit of caring and a stronger self.