Son[i]a #434
Laura Benítez Valero
Laura Benítez Valero is a researcher, lecturer and independent curator whose work explores the interconnections between philosophy, art, technoscience and bioresistance. These interests (and passions) have taken her to numerous educational and artistic institutions both inside and outside of Spain, navigating—and also drowning in—the sea of structural precariousness of cognitive capitalism. Since 2024, she has been a lecturer in the Department of Philosophy at the Autonomous University of Barcelona (where she also earned her PhD), in what is the first stable employment contract of her long career.
This fertile ground—and growing up and going to school in Barcelona’s El Carmel in the 1980s—has given rise to her ongoing research project Class Will Tear Us Apart, Again. From a window without sky, in houses without books and a neighbourhood without libraries, Laura Benítez Valero retraces her steps, charting a family tree, without a tree: an invisible biography of the resistance (rage and impotence) of many working-class and migrant women and families, looking at the city of Barcelona, with its history and monuments, from the vantage point of precarious buildings and lives.
In this podcast, we sit with Laura Benítez Valero under a glass ceiling that never quite cracks, to talk about its unshakeable foundations, the question of class, and the scaffold of the meritocracy. Anger and shame are the emotions provoked by the emergence of this perverse and oppressive system, which reproduces inequalities generation after generation, until they become ingrained. From the same perspective, Laura Benítez Valero proudly recounts the legacy of a community-based education in the struggle of women who support families and children. She also talks about music and dance as catalysts and points of escape; and about research projects that take place outside of academia, in the form of erratic, intuitive and affective methodologies in which enjoyment plays a central role.
With the support
Funded by the European Union. Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the European Education and Culture Executive Agency (EACEA). Neither the European Union nor EACEA can be held responsible for them.
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