Susann Schmeisser

Sabine Flick is professor for “Geschlecht und Sexualität in der Sozialen Arbeit” at the Fulda University of Applied Sciences. Her research assumes an interdisciplinary outlook, crossing over the fields of social theory and critical theory, medical sociology, the sociology of the professions and questions of normativity and critique in empirical research. 2020 she completed her habilitation on the topic “On the Biographization of Social Suffering – Psychotherapeutic Practice in the Working Society”. Her work has been published in international journals such as Social Science and Medicine,  Distinktion. Journal of Social Theory or the European Journal for Social Theory.

During her stay in Berlin she worked on social suffering as psychic crises and the increasing dethematization of the social in mental health institutions and professions.  Her interest focuses on how a Critical Theory of Social Suffering can be accompanied with adequate empirical sociological research methods. While in Berlin and during the start of the COVID-19 Pandemic she prepared an empirical research project reflecting on the economic crisis associated with the COVID-19 pandemic that will likely increase the depth and breadth of precarious and highly demanding work. Here is a preprint of this work on „Work-related suffering as Social Suffering“. She also wrote a paper during her stay at the Center on the „Biographization of Social Suffering“ which is published with the Journal „Westend. Neue Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung“ in Fall 2020.

Allison Weir is a Canadian social and political philosopher. She co-founded the Institute for Social Justice in Sydney, Australia, where she was Research Professor and Director of the Doctoral Program in Social Political Thought until the Institute closed in 2018. Before moving to Australia she held a tenured professorship in Philosophy and in Women and Gender Studies at Wilfrid Laurier University in Canada. She returned to Canada in 2019, and is a Visiting Scholar at the Centre for Ethics at the University of Toronto.
Her book, Decolonizing Freedom, will be published by Oxford University Press in 2021. She is the author of Identities and Freedom (Oxford) and Sacrificial Logics (Routledge).

Nikolas Kompridis is Research Professor in Philosophy and Political Thought and Foundation Director of the Institute for Social Justice at the Australian Catholic University. He is the author of The Aesthetic Turn (Bloomsbury, 2014), Critique and Disclosure (MIT Press, 2006), and Philosophical Romanticism (Routledge, 2006). He is currently completing a book on Aesthetics and Political Theory, which will be published by Polity Press, and another book, Critique and Receptivity, which is currently under review. Two other book projects involve an edited volume on Transforming the Anthropocene, and a volume of his writings on romanticism. Kompridis has published widely in journals and edited volumes on a wide and diverse set of topic.
His areas of specialisation are 19th and 20th century European Philosophy; Critical Theory, aesthetics and political philosophy. He optained his Ph.D. in 1992 at the interdisciplinary programme in Social and Political Thought at York University, Toronto.

Jonathan Klein is a Fellow at the Center in Berlin. He studied European Studies, International Politics and Political Theory in Maastricht, Tokyo, New York and Frankfurt am Main and subsequently worked as a research assistant at the Cluster of Excellence “The Formation of Normative Orders”. He is currently writing his doctoral thesis in Frankfurt am Main (under the supervision of Prof. Dr. Martin Saar) on the systematization and reconsideration of the concept of societal alienation in social theory.

According to his interpretation, the concept of societal alienation refers to a specific constitution of social relations, in which these relations become an alien power, relatively independent of the will of the actors, who nevertheless produce them. His work seeks to demonstrate that the concept of alienation is indispensable for understanding the social-theoretical specificity of the social interdependence constituted by the system of commodity production.

Grasping the constitution of this social connection with its contradictory dynamics is the basis for arriving at a more profound understanding of the economic and political crises of our time. Furthermore, such a perspective is oriented towards an immanent critique of the capitalist economy, holding the promise for developing more realistic perspectives of transformation.

Jean Louise Cohen is the Nell and Herbert Singer Professor of Political Thought at Columbia University, New York. She is specialized in contemporary political and legal theory with particular research interests in democratic theory, critical theory, Civil society, gender and the law. Her influential contributions span from a critique of the missing political philosophy in Marx to a reactualization of Habermas‘ theory of society as the basis of contemporaray democratic theory.

In her current research project, Jean Cohen criticizes the appeal to a populist base as regressive even when issued within the context of left-wing populist radical democracy. The fallacy of populism is that it equates a homogenized idea of „the people“ with the democratic social body. Modern representative democracies, however, depend on a differentiated civil society which allows for the articulation of diverse and opposing interests and institutionalizes the mediation between those interests, as well as the more formal democratic decision-making processes.

Andrew Arato is a Professor of Political and Social Theory in the Department of Sociology at The New School for Social Research, New York. He is a member of the famous Hungarian School of Marxism in his early intellectual formation and is widely recognised for his influential book Civil Society and Political Theory, coauthored with Jean L. Cohen. He is also known for his work on critical theory, constitutions, and was from 1994 to 2014 co-editor of the journal Constellations with Nancy Fraser.

During his stay at the Humanities and Social Change Center he worked on a study of the authoritarian impulse discernible in right-wing populism as based on a phantasized reduction of the complexity of civil society to the unity of a homogenous people. To understand the role of religious extremism in this context, it is crucial to de-link it from traditional and particular communities of faith, and understand it as a reaction to a crisis of a civil society failing to mediate the diverse interests and democratic claims of its constitutency.