The main focus of my research is what one may call “post-identitarian” social movements. These movements, from the Zapatistas via the queer movement to current democratization movements in the West, have become suspicious of the idea of a stable identity, including their own identity. Strategies and procedures of self-questioning are deliberately built into the cultural, artistic, mediatic and performative practices of local and transnational protest. In my time at the IFK I will study two aspects of the phenomenon: (1) the question of how transnational social movements cope with the dissolution of (academic and theoretical) certainty markers by producing their own knowledge and theories; and (2) how they deliberately turn un-certainty into a productive and democratic tool by constructing their own identity along non-essentialist, non-identitarian lines.

Oliver Marchart promovierte in Philosophie an der Universität Wien und am Government Department der University of Essex. Er war Fellow am Centre for Theoretical Studies der University of Essex und am Columbia University Institute for Scholars at Reid Hall und der Maison des Sciences de l’Homme (MSH), Paris. 1997/98 war er IFK_Junior Fellow. Mit Oktober 2012 übernahm er die Professur für Soziologie an der Kunstakademie Düsseldorf.