Simon Addison

Visiting Scholar

Simon Addison is a Visiting Scholar at the center and Marie Curie Research Fellow at the University of Manchester, UK. A geographer and humanitarian practitioner with ten years experience in the fields of humanitarian relief and protection, Simon’s research seeks to develop a critical understanding of conflict-related humanitarian crises through the use of theoretical tools derived from critical theory, historical geographical materialism, post-colonialism and political ecology. He completed his doctoral work in Geography at the University of Oxford, where until recently he worked as the Senior Research Officer and Policy Programme Manager for the Refugee Studies Centre. Simon’s current project, entitled ‘the space of crisis’ seeks to develop a theoretical framework for better understanding the spatiality of complex humanitarian emergencies through a comparative analysis of situations in Uganda, Congo, Darfur and Sri Lanka.

Participating Years

2011–2012

How to Fight: Transformational Politics and Culture

In response to contemporary crises of economics and politics one often sees polemics caught between reform and revolution but this division may be false from the position of radical politics and thought. As many have shown, reform has a more radical potential, one that takes social forms seriously enough to push their limits, to create new relations, to pose, as it were, non-reformist reform. Are there philosophical, literary, and aesthetic expressions of possibility that give us some purchase on rethinking how we do what we do?
2010–2011

Labor/Crisis/Protest

Labor processes and conditions of employment in almost all sectors of the economy and most of the world have been revolutionized over the last thirty years. Generally, the share of wages in gross domestic product has declined while the share taken by capital (finance in particular) has soared. The response (or lack of it) to these new conditions has been patchy, raising questions of the state of political consciousness and political subjectivity among affected populations. Where, many ask, is the outrage and why the lack of mass protest and mass movement?