Critical Studies Programme / Sandberg Institute

There's still time to apply for the next intake of the Critical Studies MA programme! Applications close in just under 1 week, on April 1. 🔜⏰

For more information, visit: sandberg.nl/main-department-critical-studies

Join us this weekend, on Friday 13 and Saturday 14 June, for the Critical Studies End of Year Programme at Plantage Dok (Plantage Doklaan 8, 1018CM Amsterdam) — part of the Sandberg Instituut's Graduation Exhibition 2025.

For the full schedule and notes on accessibility, visit:
https://sandberg.nl/graduation-2025/departments/critical-studies

We're pleased to announce that we're being joined this Thursday, May 8, for 'Readings' by Hannah Black, which will start at 17.00 (Amsterdam time) and will take place at the Critical Studies studio.
All are welcome.
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Hannah Black is an artist and writer. Her most recent solo exhibitions were The Directions at Vleeshal in the Netherlands (January-April 2025), Hard Limits at Galerina in New York (June 2024), and Marked by a Blank or Occupied by a Lie at Octo in Marseille (March-June 2024). She is represented by Arcadia Missa in London and Isabella Bortolozzi in Berlin. She is the author of two small books, Dark Pool Party (2016) and Tuesday or September or the End (2022), and writes for a number of publications including Bookforum, 4 Columns and Tank. She lives in France.

At this event, Black will read excerpts of texts from a forthcoming publication with Semiotext(e).

We're pleased to announce that we're being joined this Thursday, April 3, by Hannah Proctor.
Her lecture, 'On Dreams and World History:
Psychoanalysis, Perestroika and the Collapse of the Soviet Union' will start at 17.00 (Amsterdam time) and will take place at the Critical Studies studio.
All are welcome.
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What place do dreams have in world history? What is the relationship of the individual to the historical? Are romances, feelings, and dreams historically incidental or consequential? This talk will approach these questions through a discussion of the re-emergence of psychoanalytic ideas during perestroika and the collapse of the Soviet Union. Psychoanalytic ideas were hugely popular in this time and place, a popularity that derived partly from their long suppression under communism but also from the compelling theory of the psychosocial consequences of political repression they offered. Freudian thought provided ways of making sense of history and individual experience at a moment when people's everyday lives were changing dramatically, opening up urgent questions about the relationship between fate and will, the historical and the eternal, the inevitable and the contingent.

Hannah Proctor holds a Wellcome Trust University Award at the Centre for the Social History of Health and Healthcare at the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow. She is the author of two books: Psychologies in Revolution: Alexander Luria's 'Romantic Science' and Soviet Social History (Palgrave, Mental Health in Historical Perspective series, 2020) and Burnout: The Emotional Experience of Political Defeat (Verso, 2024). She is a member of the editorial collective of Radical Philosophy and a contributing editor at Parapraxis.

We're pleased to announce that we're being joined this Thursday, February 27, by Søren Mau
His lecture, 'A Materialist Defense of Utopian Thinking' will start at 17.00 (Amsterdam time) and will take place at the Critical Studies studio.
All are welcome.
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Ever since Marx dismissed the 'utopian socialists' and declared that "communism is the most determined opponent of all utopianism," Marxists have been skeptical of attempts to provide detailed descriptions of a post-capitalist world. Utopian thought has been deemed impossible, useless, and undesirable. In this talk, Søren Mau will argue that Marxist anti-utopianism contains many important insights but is not equally valid in all historical contexts. He will contend that our contemporary moment—marked by the rise of the far right, fragmented struggles, unchecked capitalism, prolonged economic stagnation, deindustrialization, and escalating climate crises—calls for a reevaluation of utopian thought. Drawing on a philosophical critique of classical anti-utopianism and a historical analysis, Mau offers a materialist defense of utopian thinking as an integral part of the struggle for freedom in the 21st century.

Søren Mau is an unemployed communist philosopher based on the Danish island of Lolland. He is interested in capitalism, power, the body, human nature, freedom, and utopianism. In 2023, he published the book Mute Compulsion, and now he is writing a book about communism.

Join us this weekend, on Saturday 8 and Sunday 9 June, for the Critical Studies End of Year Programme at Door Open Space (Tt. Vasumweg 31) — part of the Sandberg Instituut's Graduation Exhibition 2024.

For the full schedule and notes on accessibility, visit: https://sandberg.nl/graduation2024/departments -studies

We're pleased to announce that we're being joined on Friday, April 26, by Keston Sutherland.
His lecture, 'Marx on Death' will start at 13.00 (Amsterdam time) and will take place at the Critical Studies studio.
All are welcome.
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Marx saw death everywhere. Bread full of dead beetles, empiricism full of dead facts, history full of dead revolutions, cities full of dead bodies, the dead burying their dead, le combat ou la mort, workers continuously dying, and, fundamental to all flesh and history, the domination of life itself by dead labour in the form of capital. This talk will explore what Marx meant by death, dying and deadness. What does it mean to die under capital? Is there a specifically capitalist form of death? What would dying mean if there were no more dead labour? Is the critique of political economy a critique of death?

Keston Sutherland is a poet, theorist and literary critic. His books include Meditations, Scherzos Benjyosos, Whither Russia, Poetical Works 1999-2015, Stupefaction, Stress Position and Hot White Andy. He lives in Brighton and is Professor of Poetics at the University of Sussex, UK.

We're pleased to announce that we're being joined this Friday, April 12, by Dr. Jamila Mascat.
Her talk, 'If I Can’t Speak For You, It’s Not Our Revolution!
The Dialectics of Radical Feminism,' will start at 14.30 (Amsterdam time) and will take place at the Critical Studies studio.
All are welcome. To register, email: [email protected]
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In the genealogy of feminist and postcolonial critique, the act of “speaking for” another – that is, representing their voice on their behalf – has long been condemned as a violation, undermining the legitimacy and agency of marginalized subjects. However, as Adrienne Rich perfectly phrases it in her “Notes towards a Politics of Location” (1984), if “You cannot speak for me,” “I cannot speak for us,” and the use of pronouns becomes a “political problem,” feminist praxis risks being reduced to a collection of “ego-histories” and “singular pasts” (Traverso, 2022). Drawing from the predicament of pronouns as it emerged in contemporary feminist politics, the paper critically engages with the role of personal experience, first-person accounts, and individual feelings in feminist narratives. In conclusion, it advocates for revisiting the Hegelian form of the concrete universal to rethink radical feminist partisanship.

Jamila M. H. Mascat is an Assistant Professor of Gender and Postcolonial Studies at the Graduate Gender Programme at Utrecht University.

We're pleased to announce that we're being joined this Friday, February 16, by Dr. Nadia Bou Ali.
Her talk, 'Resistance to Theory,' will start at 14.00 (Amsterdam time) and will take place at the Critical Studies studio.
All are welcome. To register, email: [email protected]
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Nadia Bou Ali is Associate Professor and director of the Critical Humanities Program for the Liberal Arts at the American University of Beirut. She is the author of Hall of Mirrors: Psychoanalysis and the Love of Arabic.

The immanentism of power, shared by Foucault and Habermas, today plagues critical theory and blocks the development of political forms capable of responding to the increasing urgency for social transformation. This talk proposes that a Hegelian psychoanalytic concept of resistance is more useful for critical theory than this understanding of power, precisely because it introduces a different account of time to that of legal and moral adjudications. The suspension of judgement in acts of resistance disrupts stasis and introduces an anxious opening, an interruption, a concrete experience of that which does not work and begets repetition. The talk aims to ask: how do we resist the hegemony in theory that disavows the possibility of an excess to the binary of the law and its exception?