SPAH Seminar Series Week 19: Dr Sarah Bufkin

Part of the SPAH Seminar Series, Sarah Bufkin gives a talk on 'the hunger strike as a biopolitical technology: the case of the 1981 Irish republican prison protest'

This talk explores how the hunger strike functions as a “politico-military strategy” by looking to the case of the 1981 Irish republican protests in the Maze Prison. I read this act of willed self-starvation as a biopolitical technology that forces a performative contradiction between the state’s juridical claim to sovereignty and its welfarist commitment to fostering life. Yet in postcolonial contexts like Northern Ireland, I argue, such a tactic is often limited by racialized practices of affective disinvestment which remove the hunger strikers from the sphere of moral concern.

About the speaker:
I am a postdoctoral researcher in political theory and an examination fellow at All Souls College, Oxford. My research sits at the intersection of antiracist political theory and Critical Theory, including that of the German Frankfurt School, French poststructuralism, and the British Birmingham School of Cultural Studies. I am currently working on a book project focused on Frantz Fanon's sociogenic method of antiracist critique. I also write about the politics of voice and visibility in the U.S. and Northern Ireland.

To attend, please email spahpg@essex.ac.uk for the Zoom link. The seminar will also be streamed in NTC.3.07 for those wishing to attend on campus.