about

My name is joshua j. kurz, and I am PhD Candidate in the Department of Comparative Studies at Ohio State University. During the summer of 2012 I will be a Visiting Scholar at the University of Oulu, Finland, with the Mobilities, Borders, and Identity Research Group. I am currently working on a dissertation that takes up Giorgio Agamben’s challenge (in “Beyond Human Rights”) to rethink political theory through the figure of the refugee, especially through an exploration of the relation between politics and mobility. The tentative title for this study is “The Figure of the Refugee: Abandonment, Mobility and the Coming Politics.”

My primary research concerns center on questions of:

• mobility and State controls/restrictions;
• borders, bordering practices, and geopolitics;
• liberalism, its immediate preconditions (notions of national territories and colonialism’s hierarchization of human life), and figures of membership or exclusion (i.e. the Citizen, the refugee, the slave);
• political theory, citizenship, and rights.

I espouse an explicit ‘No Borders’ politics and understand borders and bordering practices as political technologies facilitating a system of global apartheid, or differential inclusion/mobility.

My PhD committee consists of Philip Armstrong (Comp Studies, advisor), Mathew Coleman (Geography), and Leo Coleman (Comp Studies).

***********************************************************************************************************************************

My dog, Luce

“The state of the integrated spectacle (or, spectacular-democratic state) is the final stage in the evolution of the state-form – the ruinous stage toward which monarchies and republics, tyrannies and democracies, racist regimes and progressive regimes are all rushing… All appearances notwithstanding, the spectacular-democratic world organization that is thus emerging actually runs the risk of being the worst tyranny that ever materialized in the history of humanity, against which resistance and dissent will be particularly more and more difficult – and all the more so in that it is increasingly clear that such an organization will have the task of managing the survival of humanity in an uninhabitable world… The state of the spectacle, after all, is still a state that bases itself…not on social bonds, of which it purportedly is the expression, but rather on their dissolution, which it forbids… But what the state cannot tolerate in any way is that singularities form a community without claiming an identity, that human beings co-belong without a representable condition of belonging (being Italian, working-class, Catholic, terrorist, etc.)… For this reason – to risk advancing a prophecy here – the coming politics will no longer be a struggle to conquer or to control the state on the part of either new or old social subjects, but rather a struggle between the state and nonstate (humanity), that is, an irresolvable disjunction between whatever singularities and the state organization.” ~Giorgio Agamben, Means Without End, 86-87.