Elizabeth Povinelli

Keynote Speaker

Elizabeth Povinelli is the Franz Boas Professor of Anthropology and Gender Studies at Columbia University. Her writing has focused on developing a critical theory of late liberalism that would support an anthropology of the otherwise, informed primarily by settler colonial theory, pragmatism and critical theory. This potential theory of the otherwise has unfolded primarily from within a sustained relationship with her Indigenous Karrabing colleagues in north Australia and across five books, numerous essays, and six films with the Karrabing Film Collective. In her most recent book, Geontologies: A Requiem to Late Liberalism, Povineli finds Foucauldian biopolitics unable to adequately reveal contemporary mechanisms of power and governance and describes a mode of power she calls geontopower, which operates through the regulation of the distinction between Life and Nonlife and the figures of the Desert, the Animist, and the Virus. Geontologies examines this formation of power from the perspective of Indigenous Australian maneuvers against the settler state and was the 2017 recipient of the Lionel Trilling Book Award. Karrabing films have shown internationally including in the Berlinale Forum Expanded, Sydney Biennale; MIFF, the Tate Modern, documenta-14, and the Contour Biennale.