Asma Abbas

PhD in Political Science, Pennsylvania State University; MA in Liberal Studies, New School for Social Research; MBA & BBA, Institute of Business Administration

Asma Abbas is Professor of Politics and Philosophy, and Director of Transdisciplinary and Experimental Studies, at Bard College at Simon’s Rock. She has also served as the Dean of Academics and Professor of Liberal Studies at the Indus Valley School of Art and Architecture in Karachi, Pakistan, and the Fulbright-Masaryk Distinguished Chair in Social Studies at Masaryk University in Brno, Czech Republic. She is senior research fellow at the Global Centre of Advanced Studies, associate faculty at the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research, and teaches in the M.Phil. in Art and Design at the Indus Valley School of Art and Architecture as well as at the Bard Early Colleges in Hudson and New Orleans. Abbas is founding organiser of Hic Rosa, (and its international travelling Studio in Materialist and Anticolonial Politics and Aesthetics), the Falsework School for political education, Some Beloved Productions, ACCREW Caucus of the Democratic Socialists of America, and the Common Tern Internationalist Co-op of Cultural Workers. Abbas is the author of Liberalism and Human Suffering: Materialist Reflections on Politics, Ethics, and Aesthetics (2010), and Another Love: Overtures to a Politics of the Unrequited (2018), and curated and co-edited a large-scale collaborative pandemic writing project titled Falsework Smalltalk: Aesthetic Archives, Political Education, Recitations of a Future in Common (2021). She is currently working on an experimental political phenomenology titled Anti-Odysseus: Fugues of the Non-Homeric, and a series of essays on the “hatred of education” (in the same key as Rancière’s Hatred of Democracy). Her work has been part of several volumes and anthologies, and her essays have appeared in HypatiaTheory and EventDemocratic TheoryJournal of PoliticsPolitics and Culture, among others. She understands herself as a historian of form and method interested in probing historically contingent political experiences, in the service of liberatory anti-colonial, anti-capitalist, antifascist, and anti-nationalist hospitalities, imaginations, and cultivations in practices of knowing, being, and worldmaking.

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