We meet at Birkbeck once a month: AccessAble page here for access details.
Texts will be circulated via the mailing list: email gmarsh07@student.bbk.ac.uk to sign up.
2026-7 PROGRAMME
Tuesday, 13 October
6.30pm @ Birkbeck, Gower St (readings TBC)
Tuesday, 3 November
6.30pm @ Birkbeck, Gower St (readings TBC)
Tuesday, 1 December
6.30pm @ Birkbeck, Gower St (readings TBC)
ARCHIVE
Wednesday, 8 July
Moving on from our recent discussion of non-things, this session will focus on political ecologies of matter in Esther Leslie. We will discuss dust and crystals through reading excerpts from Liquid Crystals: The Science and Art of a Fluid Form (2017) and 'Devices and the Designs on Us' (2020). You may want to dwell on the digital simulations discussed in the 2020 essay: Dust Storm (Manter, Kansas) 2007 and Dust Storm (Dalhart, Texas) 2007.
Wednesday 17 June
We will be reading Byung Chul Han’s Non-Things (2022) and Dylan Trigg, The Thing: A Phenomenology of Horror (2014) to consider things and non-things, virtuality, and tangibility.
Tuesday, 19 May
Our texts for May’s session are chosen by friend of the Leg, Jack! We will be reaching for a counter-genealogy of modern self-defence, reading from 'What A Body Can Do' (2019) and Self-Defense: A Counter Genealogy of Modern Violence (2022) by Elsa Dorlin. Both of these excerpts are available online: here and here.
Tuesday, 28 April
We will be talking about productive and surplus bodies using extracts from Francois Guery & Didier Deleule's The Productive Body (1988) and Beatrice Adler Bolton & Artie Vierkant's Health Communism (2025). We'd also recommend the Death Panel/Red Medicine podcast episode 'The Past and Future of the NHS' as a companion, if these texts are of interest.
Tuesday, 24 March
This session will focus on animacies and animism in Mel Y. Chen and David Abram.
Tuesday, 10 March
This session will focus on two formulations of neoliberal biopolitics: homonationalism and ablenationalism. We’ll be discussing these ideas with reference to Jasbir Puar’s Terrorist Assemblages (2007), David Mitchell and Sharon Snyder’s The Biopolitics of Disability (2015), and Puar’s The Right to Maim (2017).
Tuesday, 10 February
Join us for a discussion of Julia Kristeva’s ‘abject’. We’ll be reading exerpts from Kristeva’s Powers of Horror (1982) and Barbara Creed’s The Monstrous Feminine (1993).
Tuesday, 13 February
This session we’ll be talking posthumanism via an excerpt from Rosi Braidotti's The Posthuman (2013). The reading pack also includes a commentary on Braidotti's position from Dan Goodley's article on ‘Posthuman Disability Studies’.
Tuesday, 9 December
We have something different in mind for our last session of term. Instead of discussing a set text, we would like to invite you to reflect on the themes of our discussions so far and ‘bring in’ something which relates to those themes. This could be a text, a writer, an object, an image, an artwork, a primary source, or anything else you like. In practical terms, you might want to read something aloud, have an image ready to share, or just say a little bit about what you've been thinking about. This will also be a good opportunity to return to the texts we’ve read and think about how they fit together.
Tuesday, 25 November
Our third session will focus on anaestheticised subjects and neurochemical selves in Nikolas Rose’s The Politics of Life Itself (2007).
Tuesday, 28 October
For this second session, we will be focussing on the concepts of biopolitics and psychopolitics as described by Michel Foucault and Byung-Chul Han. In the reading pack attached, you will find excerpts from Foucault’s The History of Sexuality Vol I and Han’s Psychopolitics.
Tuesday, 23 September
We begin with bodies and technology in Donna Haraway: we will base our discussion around an excerpt from Haraway’s Cyborg Manifesto.