New Regimes of Indifference: Within Academia and Beyond

About

Coldness as a general feature of bourgeois societies has already been highlighted in early critical theory, which already pointed out that without a fundamental indifference to the fate of others, many forms of mass violence would not have been possible. Today, in an era marked by devastating wars, systematic mass violence, institutional unaccountability, and emotional apathy toward out-groups, indifference persists in new and more complex forms. Perhaps most importantly, the continual visualization of suffering blurs the boundaries between empathy and solidarity with victims and a mere consumption of images.

Academia itself cannot be regarded as untouched by these new regimes of indifference. Through specific adaptations of the notion of value freedom, through distinctive modes of conformism resulting from widespread career and funding strategies, through the selection effects of educational hierarchies, as well as through other mechanisms, academic fields can also contribute to the (re)production of this very indifference. In that sense, the persistent recurrence of mass violence, the paradoxical political rhetorics surrounding it, and the production of knowledge suitable for sustaining it, all underscore the urgency of interrogating, within academia, how old forms of indifference are reproduced and new ones emerge.

In this workshop, we aim to reflect on different examples of the social production of indifference toward mass violence, both within and beyond academia, through questions like:

• How are languages of indifference being transmitted – not only through political tropes in public debates, but also through academic institutions such as universities? Which dynamics are shaping the relationships between these institutions and their wider environment?
• How are these regimes of indifference being shaped within academic institutions? To what extent do they echo a wider culture of indifference that surrounds them – or resist it? In what ways do these tendencies intersect and reinforce each other – through mechanisms such as administrative deference to political authorities, career strategies oriented toward third-party funding, specific interpretations of an ethic of value freedom, or educational formations that shape particular ways of understanding the Other?
• How do these processes contribute to normalize questions such as “Whose life matters and whose does not?”, creating disposable lives?