Ewa Majewska: Weak Resistance in Feminist Protests

For In formation, philosopher Ewa Majewska discusses the issue of weak resistance – the political agency of the ordinary, non-heroic and marginalised, using the example of the recent women's protests in Poland and globally. Theorising the recent protests as a form of subaltern counter-publics leads to a framework in which an ordinary, non-heroic agency can become a vital part of contemporary resistance.  

This lecture will be followed by an open discussion with Marsha Bradfield.  

Ewa Majewska is a feminist philosopher of culture. She was a visiting fellow at the University of California, Berkeley (BBRG), a stipendiary fellow at the University of Orebro (Sweden), IWM (Vienna) and ICI Berlin, she is currently affiliated with the ICI Berlin and works as adjunct professor at the Department of Artes Liberales at the University of Warsaw, Poland.

She is the author of three monographs, and co-editor of four volumes on neoliberalism, politics and education; she has published articles and essays in Signs, e-flux, Nowa Krytyka, Przegląd Filozoficzny, Przegląd Kulturoznawczy, Kultura Współczesna, Le Monde Diplomatique (PL) and multiple collected volumes. Her main focus is weak resistance, counterpublics and critical affect studies. 

Marsha Bradfield rides the hyphen as an artist-curator-educator-researcher-writer. This multi-barrelled practice is fired by the lived experience of authorship. To explore this, Bradfield co-authors experiments in collaborative cultural production with groups including Critical Practice Research Cluster, Precarious Workers Brigade and the Incidental Unit (formerly the Artist Placement Group). These experiments often result in understanding that Bradfield later re-presents in publications, performative lectures and other accounts. These combine fact and fiction as she works with contexts, ideas, images, methods, objects, processes, sites, structures, systems and more.

Further to a postdoctoral fellowship in economies and ecologies of collaborative cultural production at Chelsea College of Arts (University of the Arts London), Bradfield teaches BA Fine Arts and BA Interior and Spatial Design and supervises PhD students. In 2015 she founded Artfield Projects as an international platform for practice-based research in cultural production. This builds on Bradfield’s work as co-director of the London-based art organisation, Pangaea Sculptors’ Centre.