Stefano Harney is a scholar whose work, developed primarily in collaboration with Fred Moten, examines the possibilities for collective intellectual life that persist within and against the university and other institutions.

Core ideas

  • The undercommons: developed with Moten in The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study (2013), the undercommons names the spaces of study, care, and collective life that exist in refusal of institutional legibility — not a place but a condition, inhabited through fugitive relation.
  • Logistics and governance: Harney’s work examines how logistical thinking — the management of populations and flows — has become a dominant mode of governance, and how the undercommons operates as its refusal.

Notable works

  • The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study (2013, with Fred Moten)
  • All Incomplete (2021, with Fred Moten)