Jennifer Doyle (UC Riverside)
Jennifer Doyle is currently writing about harassment, sexual violence, the workplace, and the school. She is the author of “Sexual Harassment and the Privileges of Unknowing: The Case of Larry Nassar” (2019), Campus Sex/Campus Security (2015), Hold It Against Me: Difficulty and Emotion in Contemporary Art (2013), and Sex Objects: Art and the Dialectics of Desire (2006).
.Keynote Talk: “Letting Go”
Abstract
“Letting Go” describes the costs of living with stalking and harassment. It is an extended meditation on the experience of pedagogical and administrative trauma, and a reflection on grief, love and loss in the scene of queer pedagogy.
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Annie McClanahan (UC Irvine)
Annie McClanahan is an Assistant Professor of English at University of California, Irvine. Annie is the author of Dead Pledges: Debt, Crisis, and 21st Century Culture (Stanford, 2016). She is currently at work on two new projects: one on contemporary work, the other a critical history of the rise of microeconomics.
Keynote Talk: “Tipwork, Gigwork, Microwork: The Insecurity of 21st Century Labor”
Abstract
This talk takes the measure of contemporary work life. It begins by offering a historical account of what I argue are the three central paradigms for 21st century labor—tipwork, gigwork, and microwork. I describe tipwork’s wage structure as a residual form of labor contingency; gigwork as the dominant mode of contemporary in-person service, whether “unskilled” or professional; and microwork as heralding the emergence of a devastating wave of labor automation. I argue that the defining characteristic of 21st century work is low wages, but also that low-wages must be understood as a qualitative as well as quantitative measure insofar as today’s low wages structure the working experience as such, ensuring intense bodily, social, and reproductive precarity. Even apparently abstract or technical changes in the organization of work—the shift systems of tipwork, the self-harrying of gigwork, the pay-by-results structures of microwork, and the absence of minimum wage and union protections for all these forms of work—are vividly, often painfully experienced by workers themselves, especially when the wages do not provide for workers’ basic needs. Along the way, I attend to a set of cultural forms—from television to twitter poetry—that register in vividly critical terms the effects of these changes on worker’s daily lives.
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Mark Neocleous (Brunel University London)
Mark Neocleous is Professor of the Critique of Political Economy, Brunel University London. His books include Critique of Security (2008); War Power, Police Power (2014); and The Universal Adversary: Security, Capital, and “The Enemies of All Mankind” (2016). A new edition of his book The Fabrication of Social Order: A Critical Theory of Police Power (2000) is forthcoming with Verso in 2020. He is currently working on two books: one called Powers of Pacification, the other called Imagined Immunities.
Keynote Talk: “Security’s Insecurities”
Abstract
This paper explores the logic of insecurity that underpins, animates and resonates through security. The issue we face is not whether the subject is secure or insecure; aside from the banal pronouncements of politicians and security intellectuals, that issue is now dead. Rather, the issue is to grasp the ways in which insecurity is part of security’s project. We need to therefore address security’s insecurities. On the one hand, this requires a critique of the security industry: the intimate collaboration between state and capital through which the social order is constituted. This critique of the security industry involves both a long historical view but also a focus on security’s more recent neoliberal turn. On the other hand, to properly unravel security’s insecurities requires an understanding of a less well-known aspect of the long historical view: the place of security in capitalism’s disciplining of death. What emerges from this is a position taken up in opposition to the standard positions taken up in the politics of insecurity: instead of allowing ourselves to be fabricated as insecure security subjects, perhaps we need to contemplate security in the context of a more general abolitionist politics. That is: against security.
Naomi Paik (Illinois)
Naomi Paik is an Assistant Professor of Asian American Studies at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Her research examines the relationship between law and cultural politics, centering racism, state violence, and the limits of citizenship to secure rights and social equity. She is the author of Rightlessness: Testimony and Redress in U.S. Prison Camps Since World War II (UNC Press, 2016).
Keynote Talk: “Deadly Entanglements: US Imperialism and the Perils of Privatizing Security”
Abstract
This talk considers how policing and border security regimes do not secure the nation and how, in contrast, sanctuary movements try to build communities of actual safety and security for migrants and other people on the move.
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Saskia Sassen (Columbia)
Saskia Sassen is the Robert S. Lynd Professor of Sociology and Member, Committee on Global Thought at Columbia University. Her books include Expulsions: Brutality and Complexity in the Global Economy (Harvard, 2014), Territory, Authority, Rights: From Medieval to Global Assemblages (Princeton, 2008), A Sociology of Globalization (W.W. Norton, 2007), Cities in a World Economy (5th Edition, Sage, 2018), and The Global City (Princeton, 1991/2001). In 2013 she was awarded the Principe de Asturias Prize for the Social Sciences.
Keynote Talk: “When Pursuing National Security Becomes the Making of Urban Insecurity”
Abstract
When national states go to war in the name of national security, nowadays major cities are likely to become a key frontline war space. In older wars, large armies needed large open fields or oceans to meet and fight, and these were the frontline war spaces. But in today’s wars the dominant format is a traditional army confronting armed insurgents. This has made cities a prominent site in the map for warring. The search for national security, still largely a project of conventional armies, is today a source for urban insecurity. We can see this in the so-called War on Terror, whereby the invasion of Iraq became an urban war theater that extended well beyond Iraq. Thus cities that were not even part of the immediate war theater became the site for bombings — Madrid, London, Casablanca, Bali, Mumbai, Lahore, and so many others. In this process, the city becomes a technology of war for the asymmetric combatant. What may be good for the protection of the national state apparatus may go at a high (increasingly high) price to major cities and their people.
Cities have long been sites for conflicts – wars, racisms, religious hatreds, expulsions of the poor. And yet, where national states have historically responded by militarizing conflict, cities have tended to triage conflict through commerce and civic activity. But these major developments of the last twenty years signal that cities are losing this capacity and becoming sites for a whole range of new types of conflicts, such as asymmetric war and urban violence.
All of these challenge that traditional commercial and civic capacity that has allowed cities confronted with conflict to avoid war more often than not, and to incorporate diversity of class, culture, religion, ethnicity. These urban capabilities are today being tested.