Professor Elena Loizidou's Inaugural Lecture: Dreams to a better world
When:
—
Venue:
Birkbeck Clore Management Centre
What happens if instead of reason, dreaming becomes a method of understanding law and politics? Dreams can provide us with a critique of law and politics ideas, a gateway out of the trap of hope and disappointment and a sense of freedom. Freud has proposed that the dreams we have while asleep fulfil conscious and unconscious wishes not gratified when awake. Here I am concerned with dreaming, emerging when our eyes are wide open, when we witness or sense injustice, inequality and exclusion.
Dreaming as a method, I argue contours the limits of law and politics while simultaneously guide us to a better world. Dreaming as a method has accompanied me throughout my research, whether my research addressed the relationship between law and the arts, the philosophy of Judith Butler, disobedience, anarchism, and post-truth and the law.
This lecture explains how dreaming as a method guides my research by drawing specifically on my research on Judith Butler, disobedience and anarchism.
Biography
Elena Loizidou is Professor of Law and Political Theory at the School of Law, Birkbeck College. She is the author of numerous publications, including Judith Butler: Law, Ethics Politics (2007) and Anarchism: An Art of Living without Law (2023). In 2024, she curated a special electronic issue on philosopher Judith Butler for the journal Theory, Culture & Society. Her research focuses on the intersection of law and politics. Currently, her research focuses on post-truth ideology and its impact on law and democracy. She is the co-Director of the Centre for the study of Law and the Humanities (Birkbeck), the book review editor of the journal Law & Critique, and an elected member of the organising committee of the Association for the Study of Law, Culture and the Humanities.
This inaugural lecture will be followed by a drinks reception in the Clore foyer.
Contact name:
Christopher Fray