Professor Kristin Ross will deliver our Annual Internationalism, Cosmopolitanism and the Politics of Solidarity lecture. The lecture will be based on her new book, The Commune Form, which looks at the new frontal anti-capitalist antagonisms fueling recent territorial struggles.

In the defence of territories threatened by all manner of privatisation, hoarding, and infrastructures of disaster, creative ways of inhabiting that sidestep the State foster new kinds of lived solidarity. While contemporary struggles over land may not be capable of (or even aim to) overturn capitalism in one fell swoop, their pragmatic focus on self-defense serves to thwart and interrupt its development. These are also occupations that transform—dramatically—our perception of the recent past, making rural battles of the 1960s and 70s like Sanrizuka in Japan or the Larzac in France appear now as both reworkings of the archaic form of the commune and the defining battles of our era as well.

Meet our speaker and chair

Kristin Ross is Professor of Comparative Literature at New York University. She is the author of a number of books on modern French politics and culture, all of which have been widely translated: The Emergence of Social Space: Rimbaud and the Paris Commune (Minnesota, 1988; Verso, 2008); Fast Cars, Clean Bodies: Decolonization and the Reordering of French Culture (MIT, 1995); May 68 and its Afterlives (Chicago, 2002), and Communal Luxury: The Political Imaginary of the Paris Commune (Verso, 2015). 

Ayça Çubukçu (@ayca_cu) is Associate Professor in Human Rights and former (2018-2024) Co-Director of LSE Human Rights at the London School of Economics and Political Science. Before LSE, Dr Çubukçu was a Max Weber Fellow at the European University Institute, and taught for the Committee on Global Thought at Columbia University and the Committee on Degrees in Social Studies at Harvard University. In 2020, she was appointed as a Senior Fellow of the Fung Global Fellows programme at Princeton University.