Refugees and the politics of indignity

About the speaker

Professor David Owen is Professor of Social & Political Philosophy within Social Sciences at the University of Southampton. He has published widely across three main research areas: Nietzsche and post-Kantian critical theory encompassing post-structuralism and the Frankfurt School; Problems of Political Community addressing issues of multiculturalism and migration; and Democratic Theory ranging from foundational to policy-relevant levels of analysis. His current research projects address the structure of agonist political theory and its relationship to perfectionism and realism, and the ethics and politics of migration and transnational citizenship.

Professor Owen has wide-ranging research interests across the history of political thought and contemporary analytic and continental social and political theory, however, his current research is focused in two areas. The first addresses the ethics and politics of migration encompassing issues such as the ethical status of borders, a state’s right to exclude, obligations due to immigrants and to emigrants, the moral and political status of refugees, and with particular reference to the development of transnational citizenship and the ways in which migration is reshaping the citizenship regimes of states. The second research topic takes up the relationship of agonism, perfectionism and realism in Nietzsche’s work and considers the disparate paths that these themes follow post-Nietzsche – realism through Max Weber, Raymond Aron, Bernard Williams; agonism through Hannah Arendt, Michel Foucault and contemporary agonists such as Connolly, Honig and Tully; perfectionism through Stanley Cavell and Michel Foucault. This project asks how we may put these elements back together again.

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