On 12th February 2014, 5.00pm, Room 2.18 65-68 Park Place, Cardiff, I will give a lecture that draws on my recent research on the performativity of piracy. Here is the summary:

This talk is an invitation to an adventure with pirates and social theorists. Mobilizing a broad arsenal of cultural resources such as current movies about piracy from Captain Phillips to The Expendables, computer games, legal texts or pirate statistics, Christian Bueger asks in this talk what the agency of contemporary pirates is and why piracy is problematic. In the talk Somali pirates enter into a dialogue with social theorists, such as John Dewey, Bruno Latour and Michel Foucault. The result is an outline of different forms of contemporary agency and means of producing international problems. The following discussion provides an opportunity to debate the state of Somali piracy as much as different forms of performativity.