In a recent essay for Berlin Review, historian and political scientist A. Dirk Moses revisits revisits Theodor W. Adorno’s seminal essay “Education after Auschwitz” (1966) and asks how its critical and ethical imperatives might be rethought as an “Education After Gaza” today.

Moses relates Adorno’s project to the current condition of German academia and the legacy of the Frankfurt School – raising uncomfortable questions about critique, complicity, and responsibility. Together with sociologist Teresa Koloma Beck and philosopher Robin Celikates, we will discuss Moses’s proposition: what “education” could still mean in an emphatic sense, what role Critical Theory and its legacy might play under present conditions, and whether a free and critical academia remains possible—or even desired—in Germany today.

Come join us as we discuss some of the most disturbing elements of academic life in Germany—hosted and co-curated by diffrakt | centre for political periphery.

Teresa Koloma Beck is Professor of Sociology at Helmut Schmidt University in Hamburg, whose research focuses on violence, war, and the affective and epistemic dimensions of social life.

Robin Celikates is Professor for Practical and Social Philosophy at Freie Universität Berlin, and co-director of the Centre for Social Critique at the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. His work focuses on critical theory, civil disobedience, democracy, migration and citizenship.

A. Dirk Moses is the Anne and Bernard Spitzer Professor of International Relations at the City College of New York and editor of The Journal of Genocide Research, known for his work on genocide, memory politics, and German postwar intellectual history.

Free entrance; limited seating.