Marina Garcés
Philosopher and writer
A senior lecturer in Arts and Humanities Studies at the Open University of Catalonia (UOC), where she initiated and is director of the master’s degree in Philosophy for Contemporary Challenges, her main field of work is politics and critical thought, and the need to construct a philosophical voice that can speak out for commitment, action, and emancipation on the basis of awareness of our interdependence in a shared world. She has presented her thought in several essays, including En las prisiones de lo possible (Bellaterra, 2002), Un mundo común (Bellaterra, 2013), and Filosofía inacabada (Galaxia Gutenberg, 2015). The book Nova il·lustració radical (Anagrama, 2017), in which she suggests that we live in a “posthumous condition”, was awarded the 2018 City of Barcelona Prize in the Essays, Social Science and Humanities category. Her book Ciutat Princesa (Galaxia Gutenberg, 2018) consists of personal and collective political memoirs by means of which she traces the recent history of Barcelona. She has also published Escola d'aprenents (Galaxia Gutenberg, 2020), in which she vindicates the necessity to rethink the ultimate meaning of education. She has worked with such institutions as the Barcelona Institute of Humanities, the CCCB, and the MACBA, with which she has taken part in joint projects reflecting on the world of education and transformations in the domain of the humanities, and other subjects, and resulting, for example, with the project Humanitats en transició (Raig Verd, 2019) and Pedagogies i emancipació (Arcàdia, 2020). At present she is coordinator of “L’angle cec” section of the TV3 television programme “Planta Baixa”, after having regularly written for media outlets like the daily Ara. Her opinion pieces have been collected in the book Fora de classe. Textos de filosofia de guerrilla (Arcàdia, 2016), and the CCCB has also published her brief essay El compromís (CCCB, 2013). Since 2002, she has been promoting and coordinating the programme “Espai en Blanc”, a collective endeavour aiming at a committed, practical, and experimental relationship with philosophical thinking.
Update: 28 September 2020