A.A. (Ana) Flamind, MA

I currently focus on two research projects:

1. The politics of scandals: as part of my PhD research, I look into the politics of scandals. This work is situated at the intersection of political philosophy, anthropology, sociology and IR. By seeking to answer the question what do scandals do to politics?, I explore the assumption that certain forms of collective political manifestations that generate strong emotional reactions, such as scandals, can form the basis of collective participation and emancipatory politics. For this, I draw from anthropology literature on transgression and its relation to the sacred, with authors such as Michael Taussig or Georges Bataille, and from sociology authors, such as Luc Boltanski, to conceptualise how certain events constitute “tests” to institutionalised accounts of reality, on which a certain order is based. Additionally, I engage with IR literature on aesthetics and emotions to develop alternative understandings of justice.
2. Cosmologies of the end: In addition to my PhD research, I've conceived and launched a collaborative project together with other members of the History and Theory of IR chair group. This project aims to explore the conditions of possibility, as well as the consequences of inhabiting, damaged worlds and the building of cosmologies of the end, and asks: How can we conceive of an art of living in the ruins? And how could this art enable us to (re)activate ethical subjectivities and political praxis in order to carve up new beginnings? By exploring these cosmologies, we seek to critically reflect on the opportunities encapsulated by catastrophic visions of the end of time(s). Following Anna Tsing, this project problematises what it means to embrace the ruins as a universal condition in order to envision novel spatio-temporal as well as ethical and political configurations that take up the challenges of decay and transformation. The first part of this project led to the 2019 modes of reasoning lecture and seminar and a EWIS 2020 workshop (postponed to 2021).