Event overview
Talk + Book Signing
Professor Ghassan Hage says: "Over the years, I have tried to develop what I have called an anthropology of viability: an anthropology concerned with the way individuals and groups struggle to make their lives viable. Without wishing to reduce Bourdieu to an anthropologist of viability, my latest book Pierre Bourdieu's Political Economy of Being (2025) can be read as an attempt to highlight what I see as Bourdieu’s contribution to an anthropology of viability. In this talk I will try to show how Bourdieu's conceptual apparatus invites social analysts to see struggles for viability in everything. Whether they are analysing someone picking flowers in the countryside, talking about the latest Netflix series they have seen, looking for a job, or demonstrating for or against asylum seekers or genocide in Gaza, such an approach is an invitation to ask: What conceptions of, and struggle for, a viable life are implicitly or explicitly behind what is being done here? I conclude by reflecting on the way this approach is helping me think the current research project I am developing on the politics of humiliation."
Ghassan Hage's new book Pierre Bourdieu’s Political Economy of Being (2025), is one of numerous books he has published, including: Alter-Politics (2015), Is Racism an Environmental Threat? (2017), The Diasporic Condition: Ethnographic Explorations of the Lebanese in the World (2021), The Racial Politics of Australian Multiculturalism (2023), Waiting (2009), Against Paranoid Nationalism (2003) and White Nation (2000).
This talk is part of a series on 'Contemporary Mediations of Democracy and Dissent' hosted by the Centre for the Study of Global Media and Democracy and the Sociology Department. To be introduced by Prof. Nirmal Puwar and Chaired by Dr Svenja Bromberg.
Dates & times
| Date | Time | Add to calendar |
|---|---|---|
| 27 Nov 2025 | 5:00pm - 7:00pm |
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