Underworlds - Sites and Struggles of Global Dis/Ordering

Underworlds•podcasters.spotify.com

Underworlds explores unconventional sites and struggles of global dis/ordering. Guided by leading theorists and critics, we explore how familiar locations and legacies of power are cabined, crossed, and cut apart by alternative arteries, lineages, and languages of ordering and world-making - from oceanic archives to landscapes of plasticity and pollution, from the circulation of debt to the aesthetics of breathing. Across these sites, we explores new modes of resistance and refusal. Convened by Marie Petersmann (LSE) and Dimitri Van Den Meerssche (QMUL). Sound / art by Tobias & Dominique Koch.

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Episodes

Hope

Hope as Site and Struggle of Global Dis/Ordering Moving beyond modernist modes of seeing and ordering the world – ways of governing often entangled with sentimental tropes of liberal hope – this episode reflects on hope as a set of sensibilities and practices of living ‘after the end of the world’. Hope is seen, in this sense, as a specific mode for dis/ordering the world and our place within it. This entails an attentiveness to the diverging onto-epistemologies that sustain varying expressions ...

Feb 01, 2025•1 hr 11 min

Waste

Waste as Site and Struggle of Global Dis/Ordering Rather than concentrating only on how waste is defined or regulated in (international) law, this episode foregrounds the material patterns of dis/ordering that thinking through waste reveals and generates. This entails an attentiveness to the ethical positions, material practices, and shifting legal geographies that help us navigate the world from the vantage point of its wastelands. How can we trace the arteries of power and modes of production ...

Jan 15, 2025•1 hr 2 min

Frontiers

Frontiers as Sites and Struggles of Global Dis/Ordering This episode foregrounds how frontier spaces are legally, materially, and discursively produced, which subjectivities it fosters, and which modes of capitalist production it enables and forecloses. This entails an attentiveness to the forms of refusal and resistance that the violence and extractivism of frontier spaces invite. What are the lineages and legacies of frontier thinking in histories of racial capitalism, and how are these intert...

Oct 23, 2024•1 hr

Commons

The Commons as Sites and Struggles of Global Dis/Ordering Rather than focusing strictly on how the commons are formally (mis)recognised or regulated in (international) law, this episode foregrounds the diverging modes of dis/ordering that practices of commoning can produce. This entails an attentiveness to the new legal spaces that commoning engenders, as well as the forms of political subjectivity and resistance that animate it. Moving across different sites and scales, the episode explores com...

Sep 25, 2024•45 min

Debt

Debt as Site and Struggle of Global Dis/Ordering Rather than focusing only on how (sovereign) debt is formally recognised and regulated in international law, this episode foregrounds the material structures of global ordering and disordering that debt generates. This entails an attentiveness to the histories of violence that are thereby enacted or amplified, as well as a focus on practices of resistance and expressions of political subjectivity that emerge in relation to the construction and cir...

May 24, 2024•1 hr 2 min

Breath

Breath as Site and Struggle of Global Dis/Ordering Rather than concentrating only on how the right to breathe is formally recognised (or not) in international law, this event foregrounds the patterns of dis/ordering that are embedded in infrastructures of toxicity, and the unevenly allocated affordances of breath and breathing these engender. This entails an attentiveness to forms of political resistance, new approaches to law and normativity, and modalities of political subjectivity that this f...

May 01, 2024•1 hr 2 min

Oil / Coal

Oil / Coal as Sites and Struggles of Global Dis/Ordering Rather than concentrating only on how the commodities of oil and coal are regulated as objects of international law, this episode foregrounds patterns and imaginaries of global dis/ordering that these materials generate. It thereby traces the multiple entanglements between fossil fuels and the infrastructural and institutional conduits of global power. This also entails an attentiveness to the relation between the carbon world and forms of...

Apr 17, 2024•54 min

Oceans

Oceans as Site and Struggle of Global Dis/Ordering Rather than concentrating only on how oceans are formally framed or regulated as objects of international legal ordering, this episode foregrounds the patterns and imaginaries of global dis/ordering that thinking through the ocean reveal. Which material historical conditions have shaped the current legal constitution of oceanic space? Which new legal and political temporalities, geographies, and subjectivities might ‘thinking oceanically’ genera...

Apr 03, 2024•1 hr