IRF Book Launch: Social Theory of Displacement, by Howard Feather

The Interdisciplinary Research Forum invites you to a book launch:

Social Theory of Displacement: Adventures in the Everyday Life (Austin Macauley, 2024) by Dr Howard Feather

Disorientations and double-takes are a key part of the lived experience of modern capitalism. The corollary of this is an existential anxiety which drives a perpetual search for reassurances of our individual and collective identities. The experiential gaps in formal bureaucratic and marketised ‘life’ present us with absolute boundaries or difference, and hence binary forms of identity. There is an inability to cope with the hybridity and cognitive dissonance of everyday life.

The consequent institutional fragmentations nevertheless produce something that passes for a world of mutual recognition of institutional, life (‘collegiality’, ‘team’ and so on). The prevalence of formal institutions in modern life promotes the idea that we can find and realise ourselves within these settings and it does so by passing itself off as the experiential world that it has departed from. Modern capitalism thus is derivative of the spontaneity, contingency, and collegiality of the lived world it departs from whilst presenting itself as such a life.

Howard Feather taught social theory at London Metropolitan University for many years, having also taught at the University of East London, City University and Open University. He is the author of Intersubjectivity and Contemporary Social Theory: the Everyday as Critique. He was a longstanding member of the Editorial Collective of the journal Radical Philosophy.

Howard Feather will be in conversation with Merilyn Moos. Merilyn is an ex- lecturer at London Met, now retired and writing about the nature of identity as a child of refugees from Nazism and about resistance to the Nazis. She has had a number of books published on these themes as well as a memoir. She has been a life-long socialist and anti-racist.

There will be refreshments served after the event.

Session format: This is will be an in-person event delivered at the Holloway campus, room TBC.

If you are London Met staff or student, please use your London Met email address to register.

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