Mr Tanay Gandhi

 BA, LL.B. (Hons.), MA

Research interests

  • 20th Century French post-foundational philosophy; especially, Ranciere, Foucault, and Merleau-Ponty
  • Decolonial and Black radical traditions of thought and approaches to political theory
  • Philosophical aesthetics; from 18th Century German aesthetic theory to contemporary approaches

More research

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About

Tanay is a PhD student at the University of Southampton exploring the relation between aesthetics and democratic politics. His research focuses on the ways in which against authoritarian dispositions to order, rigidity and hardening, fugitive aesthetic-political practices generate unruly visions of the subject.

Drawing, on the one hand from decolonial and Black radical approaches, and on the other from an inflection of post-foundational philosophy rooted in embodied practice, Tanay's project attempts to draw out and unfold il/legible and in/visible performances of disorderliness in artistic and political practice.

Committed to what Tully calls a 'primacy of practice;', his project works with and within specific artistic-political movements and their particular historical conjunctures to locate their radical singularity as exemplars of a democratising (re)imagination.

Concretely, his project explores indigenous resistance and the politics of dance in central India in the 1990s, an art of Dalit writing and literary politics in 1970s Bombay (Mumbai), and the politics of architecture, property and urban space in mid-20th Century Bombay.

Tanay's research is funded by an ESRC South Coast Doctoral Training Partnership PhD Studentship.