Location: room 7000, SFU Harbour Centre. Both the building and room (via elevators) are wheelchair accessible.

Doors open at 7:00pm. Event is FREE and open to the public. No registration required.

ABSTRACT:

A spectre is haunting Europe and beyond—the spectre of right-wing populism. It seems that there is no holy alliance to exorcise this specter. What Is to Be Done? In a friendly and informal roundtable, we will discuss burning questions: What are the different reasons for the far right gaining ground in most Western countries? How have neoliberal policies contributed to its rise? How to overcome the antagonism of “us versus them”? What role does the migration crisis play? What are the similarities and differences between the right wing resurgence in Europe and North America (Canada, US)? Where is the left and its counterproposals?

SPEAKERS:

Rita De Grandis, Professor of Spanish American literature at UBC, applies critical theory to modern and contemporary Latin American literature, cinema, and popular media, and challenges arguments on cultural hybridity in Latin America, focusing on its major proponent in the 1980s and 1990s, Néstor García Canclini. She is the author of 2 books: "Reciclaje cultural y memoria revolucionaria. La práctica polémica de José Pablo Feinmann" [Cultural Recycling and Revolutionary Memory: The Polemical Practice of José Pablo Feinmann] (2006) and "Polémica y estrategias narrativas en América Latina" (1993), 2 co-edited books, and numerous articles and book chapters in peer-reviewed journals and books in English, Spanish, French and Portuguese.

Samir Gandesha is an Associate Professor in the Department of the Humanities and the Director of the Institute for the Humanities at Simon Fraser University. He specializes in modern European thought and culture, with a particular emphasis on the 19th and 20th centuries. His work has appeared in Political Theory, New German Critique, Kant Studien, Philosophy and Social Criticism, Topia, the European Legacy, the European Journal of Social Theory, Art Papers, the Cambridge Companion to Adorno and Herbert Marcuse: A Critical Reader as well as in several other edited books. He is co-editor with Lars Rensmann of "Arendt and Adorno: Political and Philosophical Investigations" (Stanford, 2012). His book (coedited with Johan Hartle) "Reification and Spectacle: On the Timeliness of Western Marxism" (University of Amsterdam Press) is forthcoming later this year and "Aesthetic Marx" (Bloomsbury Press) also co-edited with Johan Hartle will appear in 2017.

Johannes Maerk, PhD. University of Innsbruck Austria (Political Philosophy), is the Director of the Viennese Ideaz Institute, Lecturer at the University of Vienna, and Professor at the University of Quintana Roo, Mexico (leave of absence). He also had research and teaching appointments at National University of Mexico (UNAM), Simon Fraser University/Vancouver, the University of the West Indies/Jamaica, State University of Rio de Janeiro (UERJ)/Brazil, and Warsaw University/Poland. His research interests are non-western and comparative social sciences (political thought, IR), epistemology, South-South relations, and development issues. He currently has research projects in Latin America and the Middle East. Among his publications are the edited volumes “Existe una epistemologia latinoamericana” and “Cómo democratizar la democracia,” as well as articles about political thought in Latin America and Canada, Red Vienna, and other topics related to his research interests.

Jerry Zaslove, Professor Emeritus, is the Simon's Chair in Graduate Liberal Studies at SFU who studied Comparative Literature at Western Reserve University and the University of Washington. He specializes in Comparative Literature and Social History of Art influenced but not limited by the traditions of the radical and individual implications of critical theory and the arts, European literature, psychoanalysis and aesthetics, anarchism.