Keynote by Stefanie Hürtgen¹
¹ University of Salzburg, Austria; Frankfurt Institute for Social Research, Germany
TIME: Wednesday, 15 July, 12:15 – 13:15
Location: HS1
Session: Keynote 5
Abstract
Critical Psychology emphasis that, in order to analyze capitalist societies, we must adopt the analytical “standpoint of the subject”. This is to understand why and how the exploited and suppressed contribute, through their everyday practices and orientations, to the creation and reproduction of the very structures that humiliate and endanger them – and how on the other side collective and transformative agency can be conceived. In the keynote, I want to bring this claim together with geographical concepts and those coming from sociology and critical political economy to discuss the socio-ecological catastrophe that we risk running into. I will give some theoretical and empirical reflections on current exhaustive forms of labor’s and nature’s capitalist exploitation, and how they are related. One overall thesis is that we face not only ecological but also social tipping points. To encounter them, the “standpoint of the subjects” must be strengthened, both analytically and politically, not least to change our understanding of what “the ecological” means and how it is related to living labor.
Bio
Stefanie Hürtgen is from East Berlin and, following the so-called “Wende,” was longtime active in political and trade union education. Today, she works as an associate professor of geography and sociology at the University of Salzburg and is a permanent fellow at the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research. There, she is currently leading a project on global battery production networks. Her research focuses on labor geography and labor agency, the transnationalization of labor and (re)production, and the crisis of society’s relationship with nature.