'Thinking with and beyond Innocence: from Liberal to Illiberal Politics'
Through the lens of recent political events, I will suggest that claims to innocence serve as a battleground for the shifting relationship between liberalism and illiberalism in the contemporary world, and as the ground of contemporary politics. Specifically, the liberal, Enlightenment belief that we all start off (equally) innocent is challenged by the illiberal notions that are circulating more and more widely, suggesting that innocence is less about equality, and more about essentialist, racially informed notions of inheritance or blood lines, and biology. In the liberal version, despite claims to the contrary, innocence has always been racialized and gendered; in its illiberal incarnation, it is an essentialist condition. Both enable profound political inequalities and hierarchies. I discuss the need to cultivate other ethico-political and affective ways of being, beyond innocence: contaminated, impure and entangled.
Miriam Ticktin is Professor of Anthropology at the CUNY (City University of New York) Graduate Center, and Director of the Center for Place, Culture and Politics. She publishes widely on topics such as migration, borders, humanitarianism, and racial and gendered inequalities, and most recently, she has written about the idea of a decolonial feminist commons. She is the author of the award-winning Casualties of Care: Immigration and the Politics of Humanitarianism in France (2012), and co-editor of In the Name of Humanity: The Government of Threat and Care (2010). Her latest book, Against Innocence: Undoing and Remaking the World, came out with University of Chicago Press in November 2025. She is currently working on her next book, Containment and Commoning: From Bordered Worlds to Collective Life. In addition to her many academic articles and essays, Ticktin writes in public venues such as Truthout, LARB and Open Democracy, and organizes with migrant social justice groups in the US and in France.
