EP #438 - 2.28.2022 - Theses for Theory in a Time of Crisis

Today I welcome Jonathon Catlin and Benjamin Davis to discuss their work Theses for Theory in a Time of Crisis.

Jonathon Catlin is a PhD Candidate in the Department of History and the Interdisciplinary Doctoral Program in the Humanities at Princeton University. His dissertation is a history of the concept of catastrophe in twentieth-century European thought, spanning from the rise of fascism to climate change, with a focus on the writings of the Frankfurt School of critical theory and intellectual responses to the Holocaust. He has applied his critical work on the concept of catastrophe in public writings on the pandemic through a series of collaborations with Benjamin Davis published in Public Seminar, as well as an article in Memory Studies that interrogates the "multidirectional" memory politics of the Covid-AIDS analogy in an American context.

Benjamin P. Davis is a Postdoctoral Fellow in Ethics at the University of Toronto’s Centre for Ethics. His current research brings together human rights and decolonial thinking. It includes the articles "What Could Human Rights Do? A Decolonial Inquiry" (Transmodernity, 2020), “The Promises of Standing Rock” (Humanity, 2021), and "Human Rights and Caribbean Philosophy: Implications for Teaching" (Journal of Human Rights Practice, 2021). Outside of his work on human rights, his research considers the concepts of Édouard Glissant and Simone Weil with a view toward political belonging in the present.