New Voices Talk Series – Winter Term 2025/26 | Organized by Samantha Fazekas (Trinity College Dublin) and Maria Robaszkiewicz (University of Paderborn)

The Winter Term Talk Series 2025/26, organised by Samantha Fazekas (Trinity College Dublin) and Maria Robaszkiewicz (UPB), is dedicated to Hannah Arendt.

Arendt could aptly be described as a thinker of the crisis, or perhaps rather of multiple crises. This motif is ever-present in her work and, indeed, it is a concept that is becoming ever-present in our own time. This is one of the reasons why academic and public interest in Arendt’s writings is currently skyrocketing. It is because so many politically acute challenges today call not for dogmatic, but for critical and practical perspectives. In her works, Arendt seems to be looking for crises: cracks in the fabric of the everyday, which offer an opening, enabling individuals to appear before each other and become political actors. It is not that action necessarily needs a crisis, but a crisis definitely needs action. Crisis, for Arendt, is always ambivalent. It presupposes a destructive moment, but also a constructive one. As she states, “The opportunity, provided by the very fact of crisis – which tears away façades and obliterates prejudices to explore and inquire into whatever has been laid bare of the essence of the matter.” A crisis only proves disastrous when the reaction to it consists of recourse to the ways of thinking prescribed by tradition, answered in conventional, schematic ways. […]

Program & Further information can be found [here]