Italian Marxist theorist Antonio Gramsci developed his spatio-historical method of conjunctural analysis during the rise of fascism in Italy. He sought to understand the relations among political, economic, ideological, and military forces that were giving rise to this emergent movement and regime. Gramsci’s conjunctural analysis has become newly relevant to our own moment. Our conjuncture has been marked by multiple colliding crises, from relentless racism and vigilantism, gender violence, climate chaos, social polarization, structural unemployment, mass migration, resurgent militarism, the rise of the far right across the world, and a crisis of hegemony and for capitalism on a global scale. The challenge for scholars at present is to comprehend Gramsci’s conjunctural analysis in his own time while also “translating” his insights to confront the crises of our own.
This one-day symposium, hosted by the International Gramsci Society, the Trinity Social Justice Institute, The Townsend Center for the Humanities, and the UC Berkeley Department of Geography considers historical, spatial, and theoretical provocations posed by the Gramscian tradition in order to advance political and social theory for the present. In dialogue with scholars from across the disciplines, we will consider how we might produce spaces for conjunctural analysis and theoretical production adequate to the current conjuncture.
