Elsa Dorlin
Scholar in Social and Political Philosophy, France
Elsa Dorlin is Professor of social and political philosophy at the University of Paris VIII Vincennes/Saint-Denis (France). Previously, she was Associate Professor of History of science and History of Philosophy at the University of Paris I Panthéon-Sorbonne and, in 2009, she won the bronze medal of the Centre national de la recherche scientifique (CNRS) for her work on feminist theory and philosophy of gender. She has been Visiting Associate Professor at the Critical Theory Program of the University of California, Berkeley (2010-2011), and recently Abigail R. Cohen Fellow at the Columbia Institute for Ideas and Imagination (2018-2019). A specialist in the philosophy of Michel Foucault and continental philosophy, Dorlin’s research also focuses on Marxism, black feminist epistemology and Fanonian and decolonial phenomenology. She is the author of several books and articles, included La Matrice de la race. Généalogie sexuelle et coloniale de la Nation française (Paris, La découverte, 2006). Her latest book Self-defense: A philosophy of violence (Paris, Zones, 2017), winner of the 2018 Frantz Fanon Book Prize from the Caribbean Philosophical Association, has been translated in eight languages and is forthcoming in English (Verso).
Senses of the collapse. A phenomenology of toxic capitalism.
Elsa Dorlin worked on a book on a political history of the senses. In the immanence of daily, prosaic experience of our lives in the age of collapse, how do we think about the phenomenal manifestations of capitalism on our bodies in the context of a political genealogy of the senses? What do we perceive? who perceives and what? This phenomenology is coupled with a geography of sacrifice at the heart of which the Etang de Berre constitutes a case study.