Spring 2009 Lectures and Conferences Spring 2009 pdf
On April 17-18 we hosted a two-day public conference: Accumulating Insecurity, Securing Accumulation: Militarizing Everyday Life
full program pdf poster pdf
Conference Frame
What is the relationship between military conflict and modernity? How do we learn to distinguish battlefield from homefront? How are certain forms of human degradation normalized, made ‘banal,’ and to what effect? What might we learn about political exclusion and alienation in the contemporary social order if we bring into conversation the internment camp at Guantanamo, a migrant detention centre in Calais, a Hutu refugee camp in Tanzania, a prison in Georgia, a slum in Mumbai and an export-processing zone in Tijuana? What would this palimpsest of different forms of dispossession and alienation reveal to us about the contemporary human condition?
This conference brings together a multi-disciplinary group of scholars to examine the relationship between security and insecurity in the contemporary moment. Focusing on the relations that establish and legitimate insecure conditions of social reproduction panelists apprehend the ways by which our everyday lives are militarized, i.e. ordered by the administration of violence and the suspension of rights, practices we typically associate with the battlefield.
Keynote and University Lecturer on April 17, 4:30, HEC Aud, Goldwin Smith poster pdf
Michael Geyer, Samuel N. Harper Professor of German and European History, University of Chicago
"Millennial Militarism: Sovereignty Panics in the Contemporary United States"