Faculty of Humanities
Walter Benjamin Kolleg
Photo: Ein langer Name
At a glance
When: August 31 – September 4, 2026
Where: Hotel Seaside, Spiez (Lake Thun), Switzerland
Language: English
ECTS: 6
Costs: 600 CHF (travel, food and accommodation [double room] covered by organizer). Members of the GSAH and the Bernese Faculty of Humanities are free of charge. Single rooms are available for a surcharge of 150 Swiss francs (including Bernese applications).
GSAH/TransHumanities Summer School 2026
For some time now, scholars in the humanities and social sciences have been rethinking capital and work beyond purely economic terms. Ideas such as Pierre Bourdieu’s mapping of social, cultural, and symbolic capital, James Coleman’s concept of “social capital,” and John Guillory’s use of cultural capital in debates about canon formation have shown that “capital” operates across many dimensions of life and multiple disciplines. More recently, concepts such as “genetic capital,” “biovalue,” and “biocapital” have foregrounded the growing intertwining of biotechnology and capitalism (Donna Haraway, Michel Foucault a.o.).
In parallel, since the 1990s, attention has turned to processes of financialization that extend speculative logics far beyond traditional markets. After the 2008 financial crisis, the volatility of global finance became visible; shadow banking and high-frequency trading have undermined faith in self-regulating markets and the rational homo oeconomicus. Contemporary instability now ex-tends to new actors and infrastructures: from speculative cryptocurrencies to social media monetization, from algorithmic management or data mining to the extraction of value from user activity. “Platform capitalism” (Nick Srnicek) reshapes what counts as capital, creating precarious gig work, intensified surveillance, and contested autonomy. Some argue these shifts may signal a new “data feudalism” (Shoshana Zuboff) where power lies with those who control data rather than industrial capital.
At the same time, intersectional, feminist, and queer approaches have drawn attention to forms of labour often overlooked in classical economics: care work, unwaged work, and other gendered and racialized forms of precarity. They have shown how contemporary transformations rely on the invisibilization of reproductive and affective labour, the appropriation of (digital) commons, and the erosion of social reproduction. Global labour history has broadened our understanding of the many entangled forms of labour, from slavery and domestic service to casualized and migrant work. Other strands of scholarship examine the ecological limits of accumulation, the enduring legacies of colonialism and racial capitalism, and the cultural imaginaries through which capitalism and precarity are represented and contested. These debates unfold against the backdrop of growing economic tensions, financial nationalism, and renewed state intervention.
Together, these developments show that capital and work can no longer be grasped solely through familiar frameworks of productivity and growth. They emerge instead as unstable, contested, and deeply cultural categories—haunted by past crises yet re-shaped by the urgencies of the present. Addressing capital demands interdisciplinary dialogue, critical imagination, and a readiness to think beyond inherited paradigms.
This Summer School is organized by the Graduate School of the Arts and Humanities (GSAH) of the University of Bern within the framework of TransHumanities. We invite PhD candidates and postdoctoral researchers in the humanities and social sciences to critically engage with the transforming dynamics of capital and labour. We aim to create an interdisciplinary platform to interrogate both historical genealogies and contemporary rearticulations, combining theoretical inquiry with methodological reflection and cross-disciplinary exchange. We welcome proposals that explore, but are not limited to, the following themes and questions:
• How do literary, artistic, cultural practices reflect and critique contemporary capitalism(s) while imagining alternatives? What futures beyond growth emerge in past and contemporary social movements and in the life-making pratices of collectivities marked for extraction or disposal?
• How do intersectional, feminist, queer, postcolonial, and decolonial perspectives reframe concepts such as capital, labour, value, and social reproduction? How do ecological imperatives, Indigenous interventions, and degrowth discourses contribute to rethinking capital and labour beyond accumulation?
• What is capital without the state? How do legal and institutional frameworks—such as labour law and migration regimes—structure inequalities historically? What capacities and coercions do states and the world system of states provide for capital?
• As accumulation increasingly transits through war and militarism, border and security regimes, and technologies of population control–often themselves financialized–how are dynamics of capital, social reproduction, and labour transformed?
• What insights emerge from global and historical genealogies of work–from coerced and enslaved labour to digital gig economies–when read in light of today’s inequalities?
• How do digital and “immaterial” forms of labour, such as platform work and algorithmic management, unsettle established boundaries between production, reproduction, and consumption, and reshape value creation?
• Is “capital” still an indispensable critical tool for interdisciplinary research, or might alternative concepts such as “value”, “profit” etc. open new avenues for analysis and critique?
• What methodological innovations–archival, ethnographic, digital, comparative–help us study capital and labour across disciplines and geographies?
Keynote Speaker 2026 – Prof. Dr. Prathama Banerjee
Prathama Banerjee is an interdisciplinary historian, who works at the cusp political theory, political economy and cultural studies and is interested in deeper histories and emergent futures of democracy and equality in the Global South. She is the author of two monographs: Politics of Time: “Primitive” and History-writing in a Colonial Society (Oxford University Press, 2006) and Elementary Aspects of the Political: Histories from the Global South (Duke University Press, 2020). She has also
recently edited The Textual Lives of Caste across the Ages: Hierarchy, Humanity, and Equality in Indian History (Bloomsbury Academic, 2025). Keynote Speaker 2026 – Prof. Dr. Jodi Melamed
Jodi Melamed is professor of English and Race, Ethnic and Indigenous Studies at Marquette University. She is the author of Represent and Destroy: Rationalizing Violence in the New Racial Capitalism (Minnesota UP, 2011), and co-editor of Economies of Dispossession: Indigeneity, Race, Capitalism, a special issue of the journal Social Text (2018). Her influential essay, “Racial Capitalism,” is among the most cited articles in the journal Critical Ethnic Studies.
She has published widely on relational approaches to critical race and ethnic studies and gendered racial capitalism including “Predatory Value: Economies of Dispossession and Disturbed Relationalities” (with Jodi A. Byrd, Alyosha Goldstein, and Chandan Reddy), “The Spirit of Neoliberalism: From Racial Liberalism to Neoliberal Multiculturalism,” “Using Liberal Rights to Enforce Racial Capitalism” (with Chandan Reddy) and “ ‘Don’t Arrest Me, Arrest the Police’: Policing as the Street Administration of Colonial Racial Capitalism” (with Lisa Cacho). Her new book project, Colonial Racial Capitalism’s Command Forms: Axioms for Analysis Beyond Liberal Grids of Intelligibility (with Chandan Reddy), is under contract with Verso Books.
Professor Melamed is honored to have received Marquette University’s Robert Mary Gettel Faculty Award for Teaching Excellence (2020) and its Way Klingler Humanities Fellowship (2022-2024). She has served as the Norman Freehling Professor at the Institute for the Humanities at the University of Michigan (2024), a Fulbright Scholar at the Humboldt University of Berlin (2012-13), a Fellow of the Portal Project Social Justice Think Tank at the University of Illinois-Chicago (2020-2023), and the Race and Capitalism project at the University of Chicago (2017-2019).
The Axioms of Again and Again: Genocide Capital and Futures of Unauthorized Life-Making
In the report “From Economy of Occupation to Economy of Genocide” (2025), UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese uses the term ‘colonial racial capitalism’ to name the global system that enables economy “to operate in a genocidal mode” in Gaza and the West Bank. This constitutes an unusual, high-level diplomatic validation of the concept of colonial racial capitalism in an unlikely forum (the United Nations) and bespeaks the increasing undeniability of its relevance.
I set to work the activist hermeneutic of colonial racial capitalism descriptively, analytically, and speculatively. Albanese’s report tracks how corporate, financial, and academic entities previously complicit with Israel’s settler colonial occupation of Palestinian displacement and replacement now (after 2023) profit from the mass violence of Israel’s “economy of genocide.” My use of ‘genocide capital’ marks today’s emergent dominant configuration of colonial racial capitalism, for which the genocide in Gaza is a template, a platform, and an accelerator. The post-neoliberal, permanent war and pacification economy is driven by the intense privatization of capital power, the financialization of militarism, and the militarism of finance. It is characterized by state symbiosis (Slobodian), where capitalist autocrats (from techlords to private equity titans) unify with state power under an ideology of security imperialism and reap immense profits from their control of privatized infrastructures, including investment and credit and financialized technologies of war, artificial intelligence, surveillance, targeting-control, and resource-plundering. Breaking with the prior hegemony of the “international rule-based order” symbolized by the United Nations, the Board of Peace is this order’s political vehicle. Its consensus is not smokescreen human rights, but gendered racial supremacy and indifference to mass atrocities.
‘Genocide capital’ also names the ‘again and again’ structural violence of all configurations of colonial racial capitalism. To quote Dr. Raz Segal, scholar of genocide studies, “We live not in a post-Holocaust world of ‘Never Again’, but in the same world that led to the Holocaust, a world of ‘Again and Again’.” I argue that in order to truly and effectively call capital into question, we need approaches outside the liberal epistemologies that dominate Western and scholarly modes of understanding and analysis. This is not only because liberalism and capitalism are co- constitutive (Ince, Nichols) and liberal freedoms are structured by racial and colonial violence (Lowe). It is because liberalism writ large (in its spectrum of ideological forms including fascism) continuously provides the operational codes and praxis concepts that reproduce and materialize colonial racial capitalisms and that generate (and represent as socially good violence) the ordinary and spectacular violences inherent-continuous in capitalism’s asymmetrical relations of accumulation. I offer axioms to capture the dynamics of colonial racial capitalist systems that liberal terms of order cannot explain, for example, the operational sorting of some forms of humanity for command/others to be commanded. The axioms I offer treat liberalism’s praxis concepts – citizenship, law, property, and especially the state – as units and command forms of colonial racial capitalist operability.
The paper also centers a power that liberal terms of order render invisible: unauthorized life-making practices of collectivities sorted for command and control whose survival constitutes disobedience to racial capitalist axioms. Potentially more helpful than the categories of ‘labor’ and ‘work’ for speculating on “futures beyond growth,” unauthorized life-making practices have a vitality even under enclosure and even facing genocide capital’s “weapon power” (Musleh). When we focus on the power of unauthorized life-making, our questions about transforming capitalism change. Rather than presuming its total domination or that post-capital futures require global scale solutions, the question becomes ways to join and capacitate unauthorized life-making practices (what Tadiar calls “remaindered life”) such that, “when practice, meets, practice, meets practice, practice makes different” (Gilmore).
Keynote Speaker 2026 – Prof. Dr. Tiziana Terranova
Tiziana Terranova is Professor in Cultural Studies and Critical Digital Media Theory in the Dipartimento di Scienze Umane e Sociali at the Università di Napoli “L’Orientale”, Italy as well as Research Affiliate at the ‘Edmund W. Gordon Institute for Advanced Study, Teachers’ College, Columbia University (New York, USA). She is the author of Network Culture: Politics for the Information Age (Pluto Press, 2004); After the Internet: Digital Networks between Capital and the Common (Semiotexte/MIT Press, 2022); co-editor of Colonial Fractals: The Racial Politics of Planetary Computation (Duke University Press, 2022) and the forthcoming Network Social: on the Return of the Social in the Post-Digital age (Minnesota University Press). She is a member of the editorial boards of the journals Theory, Culture and Society (Sage), Media Theory (https://mediatheoryjournal.org/), Subjectivity (Palgrave), and Studi Culturali (Il Mulino). A Fulbright Scholar, she is on the board of directors of of the Centre for Postcolonial and Gender Studies at L’Orientale; co-founder of the Critical Computation Bureau (CCB); a member of the Transnational Technoculture Research Group (funded by a Roberta Buffet Global Collaboration Grantt) and Director of the Centro di Ricerca Interuniversitario sulle Tecnoculture Transnazionali (CRiTT).
“On the Flesh of the General Intellect and the Technoliberal Model of Labor”
This plenary lecture stages a dialogue between two interconnected lines of inquiry into the political economy of technology under contemporary capitalism. The first moves from the critique of the hegemonic imaginary of technological progress—what Neda Atanasoski and Kalindi Vora term “technoliberalism.” This ideology promises emancipation through automation while actually reproducing racial and gendered hierarchies, concealing the subaltern labour that sustains the enchanted surfaces of platform capitalism. Drawing on feminist theory, Black studies, and the philosophy of Gilbert Simondon, the argument traces how the master/servant schema is re-codified in the servant-instrumental model of contemporary technology, producing the user and the tool as mutually alienated. Yet within the recursive movement of colonial epistemology, the lecture also identifies openings—fugitive aesthetics, diasporic practices, and speculative imaginaries that point toward the abolition of the racial grammar of technological relation.
The second inquiry pushes this critique further by engaging Denise Ferreira da Silva’s abolitionist reading of the law of value. In the context of what Michael Hardt and Sandro Mezzadra identify as a “global war regime”—exemplified by the destruction of Gaza, the Congo conflict, and migrant routes across the Mediterranean—this line argues that value production operates through the violent extraction of the “flesh”: the wounded, dismembered, and dispossessed body that haunts the Marxian scene of value. Mobilizing Hortense Spillers’ distinction between body and flesh, and Ferreira da Silva’s concept of “negative accumulation,” the argument re/de/composes the concept of labour to include what Marx deemed unproductive: enslaved labour, domestic work, land, nonhuman life, and the flesh itself. This expanded materialism reveals how genocide and ecocide are not aberrations but constitutive dimensions of capital accumulation, channeled through the architecture of Artificial Intelligence and computational infrastructure.
The lecture weaves these two threads together to argue that the technoliberal imaginary and the flesh of the general intellect are two sides of the same coin. The enchanted surfaces of platform capitalism rest on a subterranean world of violence, dispossession, and extraction—a world where Palestinian flesh, Congolese minerals, and racialised labour are fed into the circuits of value production. The political imperative that follows is abolitionist: not merely the reappropriation of technology or the redistribution of its benefits, but the abolition of the master/servant schema itself and the world that feeds on flesh. The talk thus follows the implications of Ferreira da Silva’s demand for a refounding of the image of the world grounded not in separation and hierarchy, but in deep implicacy and entanglement—a world where the “thing” rather than the European subject becomes the ground of solidarity.
Summer School Team
Institute Middle East and Muslim Societies, University of Bern
Graduate School of the Arts and Humanities (GSAH), University of Bern
Graduate School of the Arts and Humanities (GSAH), University of Bern
