Closing Keynote Cornell: Elizabeth Povinelli

Elizabeth Povinelli, Franz Boas Professor of Anthropology and Gender Studies at Columbia University, will close our Cornell Conference with a keynote on May 7 2025.

Wednesday May 7: 4:30 – 6 PM: Klarman Auditorium KG70

Elizabeth Povinelli

Franz Boas Professor of Anthropology and Gender Studies

Columbia University

Can There be a Concept of Health Beyond Bios?

In this keynote, Povinelli explores some critical and legal discourses and tactics that coordinate human, more-than-human, and more-than-natural relations to health and well-being in the context of geontopower. Povinelli asks what might be the difference between a critical stance that seeks to develop a theory after geontopower and one that seeks to position itself against geontopower and asks what is the difference between a practice of extracting concepts, propositions and affects from from western sciences and/or Indigenous worlds and a practice that subtract from the former in order to make space for agencies in the latter.

Elizabeth A. Povinelli is an anthropologist and gender studies scholar, currently serving as the Franz Boas Professor of Anthropology and Gender Studies at Columbia University. Her work focuses on developing a critical theory of late liberalism, particularly examining governance and sociality within settler colonial contexts. Povinelli is a founding member of the Karrabing Film Collective, an indigenous media group based in Australia's Northern Territory, which uses filmmaking as a form of social analysis and cultural survival. She has authored several influential books, including The Cunning of Recognition (2002), The Empire of Love (2006), Economies of Abandonment (2011), Geontologies (2016), and The Inheritance (2021). Her work has been recognized with awards including the 2017 Lionel Trilling Book Award for Geontologies. Her ethnographic analysis is animated by a critical engagement with the traditions of American pragmatism and continental immanent theory.