To mark Women’s History Month, GENDER.ED, RACE.ED, CRITIQUE, and the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities (IASH) present Rosa Luxemburg at 150, a podcast featuring Dr Mihaela Mihai, Dr Maša Mrovlje, and Dr Jamie Allinson. This episode explores Luxemburg’s life, political and intellectual activities, and asks: what makes Luxemburg stand out as a theorist of social transformation? What is her place in the canon of international political theory? What are the implications of her theories on contemporary movements? Does disappointment hold political power, and how has it been utilised in Luxemburg’s work and modern revolutionary movements?
Chair: Dr Mihaela Mihai is Senior Lecturer in Political Theory in the School of Social and Political Science, at the University of Edinburgh. She is Co-Director of the Centre for Ethics and Critical Thought. Her research interests cut across political theory, philosophy, aesthetics, and social theory. Mihaela is the author of Political Memory and the Aesthetics of Care: The Art of Complicity and Resistance (Stanford University Press), and recently completed a five-year European Research Council Starting Grant project entitled ‘Illuminating the ‘Grey Zone’: Addressing Complex complicity in Human Rights Violations.’
Interlocutor: Dr Maša Mrovlje is a Marie Curie-REWIRE researcher at the University of Vienna. Her work is located within political theory, but she also draws on 20th-century philosophies of existence, as well as feminist and postcolonial perspectives to conceptualise the complexities and potentials of individual and collective action in conditions of systemic oppression. Maša is the author of Rethinking Political Judgement: Arendt and Existentialism, published by Edinburgh University Press in 2019. She is currently conducting a project entitled Disappointment: Reclaiming the Unfulfilled Promise of Resistance.
Interlocutor: Dr Jamie Allinson is a Senior Lecturer in Politics and International Relations at the University of Edinburgh. His research concerns social theory and the critique of political economy. He is especially interested in the uneven development of capitalism and in the theory and history of revolutionary transformations. Jamie is the author of The Struggle for the State in Jordan: The Social Origins of Alliances in the Middle East, which was a co-winner of the 2016 Political Economy Project Book Prize. Jamie has also worked as an external consultant with the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation.
