Critical conversations and reflections about lessons learned at the intersection of social movements and artist production. Diversity of Aesthetics collects powerful and timely conversations among leading cultural critics, artists, and organizers to connect the threads between some of the most pressing social struggles and conflicts of our time: policing, war, borders and migration, economic crisis. Across three themes—infrastructure, migration, and riots—militant thinkers, artists, educators, and others discuss aesthetic production, forms of social organization, modes of struggle against gendered and racialized capitalism, and revolutionary theory. Common to all three conversations is a commitment to rethinking the relationship between forms of critique and forms of struggle undertaken by collective social practices, offering lessons for tactics, strategies, and practices.
Andreas Petrossiants is a writer and associate editor of e-flux journal. His work has appeared in Historical Materialism, Social Text, New Inquiry, AJ+ Subtext, Frieze, Bookforum.com, Roar Magazine, the Verso blog, the Brooklyn Rail, Hyperallergic. He is a PhD candidate in performance studies at NYU where he is researching anti-eviction, squatting, and tenants’ movements as they relate to the production of social space.
Jose Rosales is an independent researcher and journalist based in Lisbon, Portugal. His work has appeared in e-flux notes, Lumpen: A Journal of Poor and Working Class Writers, and has contributed a chapter called “Communism As the Riddle Posed to History” in Double Binds of Neoliberalism (2022).
Claire Fontaine is a feminist, conceptual artist, founded in Paris in 2004, currently living and working in Palermo, Sicily.
Iman Ganji is a writer and scholar in exile and holds a PhD in Performance and Theatre Studies from Freie Universität Berlin. From 2004 to 2012, he lived in Tehran, where he worked as a translator, writer, and activist, cotranslating books by Spinoza, Marx, Benjamin, and others.
Saidiya Hartman is the author of Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America (1997; Norton, 2022); Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2007) and Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments (Norton, 2019), which received the National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism, and the PEN/John Kenneth Galbraith Award for Nonfiction, the Mary Nickliss Prize from the Organization of American Historians, the Judy Grahn Prize for Lesbian Nonfiction, and the John Hope Franklin Prize from the American Studies Association. She received a MacArthur Fellowship in 2019 and was elected a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2022. She is a member of the Royal Society of Literature and a University Professor.
Vicky Osterweil is a writer, organizer, and brick-mason based in Philadelphia. Her first book, In Defense of Looting, was an account of historical struggles for liberation in the United States. She has written about the intersections of film, politics and culture for a variety of outlets, including The Paris Review, Art in America, Al Jazeera America, The Baffler, Dissent, Lux Magazine, and The New Inquiry, where she was also a culture editor for many years. Her series on the political economy and cultural role of videogames, “Well Played,” which ran in Real Life Magazine from 2019–2020, won her the Blogger of the Year award from prestigious video game criticism outlet Critical Distance.
