Ontologies of Force: Violence, Non-violence, and Resistance

This project seeks to understand a philosophy of violence through an exploration of practices of caste discrimination and contexts of racialisation in India and Australia. In addition to foregrounding a philosophical approach, I will be drawing from Literary Studies and Film Studies to pursue the more significant themes of the thesis, which I have identified through four research questions. Firstly, how can one understand violence in relation to a juridical notion of power and force? Secondly, how do literary texts and cinema portray the violence of caste and racialisation, and how do they respond to the existing literature on the philosophies of violence? Thirdly, what are the possibilities of a theory of nonviolence, and can one understand any human action as devoid of violence? And lastly, what are the normative claims of violence? 

Microsoft Teams (online) https://tinyurl.com/2p8ctjfe