About
Tanay is a postgraduate researcher in the Department of Politics and International Relations at the University of Southampton. Principally a political theorist, his research focuses on the relations between philosophical aesthetics and radical democratic politics.
Tanay’s project – funded by the ESRC-South Coast Doctoral Training Partnership – attempts to understand the ways in which an ‘aesthetic operation’ immanent to artistic and political practices generates novel, pluralising and democratising visions of subjectivity. Problematising a broad account of an authoritarian tendency towards Order, Mastery and Necessity, increasingly hardening contemporary democratic politics, Tanay’s research tries to locate moments of softening and pluralisation, ‘disorderly’ or ‘unruly’ practices that create possibilities for reimagining who we (as democratic subjects) are, and what we can become. His research draws on an eclectic range of philosophical approaches, including French post-foundational philosophy (Foucault, Rancière, Deleuze), phenomenology (Merleau-Ponty), decolonial theory (Fanon, Anzalduà, Hartman), and Black radicalism (Moten, Robinson, Jackson).
Firmly rooted in what Tully calls the ‘primacy of practice’, Tanay’s project works with and within exemplary political/artistic enactments – the Narmada Dam movement, Dalit literature, and Kashmiri architectural practices – that together vocalise a fugitive genre of democratic (re)imagination.