PhD Oral Exam - Balam Nedim Kenter, Humanities

When studying for a doctoral degree (PhD), candidates submit a thesis that provides a critical review of the current state of knowledge of the thesis subject as well as the student’s own contributions to the subject. The distinguishing criterion of doctoral graduate research is a significant and original contribution to knowledge.

Once accepted, the candidate presents the thesis orally. This oral exam is open to the public.

Abstract

Critical disability studies and critical animal studies share a contentious history of reductive analogy between disabled people and animals. This dissertation argues that the analogical impasse is symptomatic of a deeper problem: the undertheorization of capitalism and domination in both fields, and an externalist causal grammar inconsistent with the relational, processual ontology to which each is committed. To address this problem, the dissertation assembles two methodological resources: critical materialist intersectionality, reconstructed from its Black feminist beginnings and operationalized through four criteria preserving its standpoint and materialist commitments; and the metamethodological convergence of Marx and Foucault as a shared modality of immanent critique, an ascending* analysis that reads the present backward, and a critical ontology in which causality, contradiction, and internal relations form a mutually implicated cluster, displacing the Humean causal grammar. Two pairs of evaluative chapters put the methodology to work. In disability theory, a close reading of Foucault's two 1976 articulations of biopower, in critical engagement with Puar's The Right to Maim (2017), yields a topology of antagonistic and non-antagonistic capacitation and debilitation that holds the eradicability of antagonistic forms open without conceding their remainder to naturalism. In animal theory, building from Wadiwel's Animals and Capital (2023), it develops parallel constructs of domestication and rendering alongside proletarianization and surplusization, revealing a constitutive entanglement within capitalist accumulation that critiques centred on (human) labour cannot capture. The dissertation contributes a (meta)methodological framework holding disability and animality as historically and materially co-constitutive, internally related apparatuses of power under capitalism.