The Subversive Good: Disrupting Power, Transcending Inequalities

‘We are only free when we are connected to others’ (Hannah Arendt)

What is not to like about a taco van, bought by wealthy parishioners, parked on a church lawn, staffed by undocumented immigrants, serving food to street dwellers - unless of course you work for immigration and have no jurisdiction to exercise your power on that property. This is the subversive good.

In this interdisciplinary seminar series we theoretically, aesthetically, methodologically and practically explore what happens when we forge spaces of encounter. We take as a starting point Kearney and Taylor’s 'sacrificial stranger' - persons or groups that are deemed to threaten social order, represent spectacles of unacceptability and so are forced to exist outside of legitimate citizenship. In juxtaposition to such understandings of ‘otherness’ we explore the ‘everyday ethics’ (Banner) of prioritizing connectedness within broader questions about borders, security, belonging, faith, personhood, education and justice.

We engage with these themes by considering institutional and disciplinary assumptions, motivations, enablers and constraints upon the capacity of ‘encounter’ to shift or alter understandings of selfhood, belonging, and what it means to an active member of the public sphere.