Concludes the seminar series by considering the diversity of responses to contemporary social, techno-scientific, and political economic transformation. What capacities for resistance, resilience and reworking lie in the reconfiguration of long-standing categories of feminist analyses?
Speakers include: Angela McRobbie (Goldsmiths), Linda McDowell (Oxford), Cindi Katz (CUNY), Davina Cooper (Kent), and Elisabeth Pruegl (The Graduate Institute, Geneva)
Room 410, Graduate School of Education, 35 Berkeley Square (No. 1 on the precinct map)
10:00 Welcome by Professor Wendy Larner
10:30 Presentation by Cindi Katz (Professor of Geography in Environmental Psychology and Women's Studies, City University of New York).
Chaired by Julie MacLeavy.
Cartographies and Cartouches: The Geographical Imagination of Accumulation and Dispossession
As the global crisis of neoliberal capitalism continues, the troubling effects of overaccumulation and several decades of privatization, commodification, and financialization, each sieved through the other, are felt around the globe. Both critique and complement, this paper reframes David Harvey’s notion of accumulation by dispossession around the gendered and racialized questions of social reproduction, taking in the scales of everyday life and connecting global north and south. I argue that global expansion is riddled with and enabled by intimate dispossessions, looking at the risk landscape around job loss and home foreclosures; the representational economies of microcredit schemes; and the material social practices around conception, surrogacy, and adoption that expose an oscillation between figurations of the child as ornament and as waste. Producing some cartouches for the present, I will look at the incoherent confluence of accumulation and dispossession and suggest alternative geographical imaginations through which contemporary productions of risk and waste might be reimagined and redressed.
12:00 Lunch
13:00 Presentation by Davina Cooper (Professor of Law and Political Theory, University of Kent)
Chaired by Maria Fannin
The Heterotemporal Present: Reading the Future Through Everyday Utopias
This talk will explore the relationship between feminism and futurity through the interconnected temporal threads that run through ‘everyday utopias’ – social sites that undertake quotidian practices in innovative and unusual ways, oriented, in particular, to freedom, democracy and equality. The talk will focus on three temporal threads: the continuous present (which colonizes other times), the intensive present (which digs deep to find kernels of other times) and the punctuated present (which works through the creation of temporal horizons). While each of these temporal threads folds in past as well as future, the talk will focus on their relationship to the future, and specifically how this relationship gets played out through new moralities, ethics and politics.
Drawing on utopian studies and theoretical accounts of time, the talk will use the examples of everyday utopian sites in order to shed light on the following questions: is the future an agentic force always full of surprise or might we think of the future as a realm that feminist politics can build? How useful is it to find glimpses or kernels of the future within the present? What temporal force do new feminist moralities have? And does feminist politics in fact need a concept of the future?
14:30 Tea & coffee
15:00 Panel on Feminism and Futurity
Chair: Julie MacLeavy
Ellie Jupp (Open University), Kate MacLean (Kings College London), Michelle Bastian (Manchester)
17:30 Public lecture by keynote speaker, Peel Lecture Theatre, School of Geographical Sciences (No. 27 on the precinct map)
Angela McRobbie (Professor of Communications, Goldsmiths University)
Chair: Judith Squires (Dean, Faculty of Social Sciences and Law)
Discussant: Janet Newman (Emeritus Professor of Social Policy, Open University)
Feminism and Immaterial Labour? Gender of Post-Fordism
This lecture will discuss my work on the 'new culture industry' that will appear in 2011 as a book titled Be Creative: Precarious Labour in Art and Cultural Worlds, London , Berlin , Glasgow. This book undertakes a theorisation of precarious labour drawing on the work of Michel Foucault. It examines the world of freelance, casualised creative work in three cities, it pays particular attention to micro-enterprises of creative labour including fashion design, art- working, multi-media, curating, arts administration, and so on.
19:30 Seminar Dinner
Hepple Lecture Theatre, School of Geographical Sciences (No.27 on the precinct map)
10:00 Welcome by Julie MacLeavy
10:30 Presentation by Linda McDowell (Professor of Human Geography, Oxford).
Chaired by Wendy Larner
After the Crisis: Economic Hardship, Resilience and Youth Identities
In this paper I want to explore some of the connections between the opportunities for young British people, their construction of masculine and feminine identities, and employment change and rising inequality, especially in the context of a change of Government and the aftermath of the financial crisis. As well as looking forward, I want to briefly reflect on the work I undertook with young men in Cambridge and Sheffield at the turn of the millennium (McDowell 2003), and on a more speculative paper about femininities and masculinities in the new economy (a term incidentally that I now regret using so uncritically) that is included in Andy Furlong’s (2009) reader on youth, which I wrote before the major banking crisis in 2008 but which was published afterwards. I also want to open a dialogue with Angela McRobbie’s (2009) work on femininities in the aftermath of feminism and of crisis.
12:00 Lunch
13:00 Presentation by Elisabeth Pruegl (Professor of Political Science, Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies, Geneva).
From the Governance of Women to the Governance of Gender
Chaire by Maria Fannin
In this paper I use the Foucaultian concept of governmentality in order to trace the 20th century shift from women as an object of governance to gender as an object of governance. I associate the first type of governmentality with disciplinary power and the second with neo-liberal biopower. The paper fleshes out the contours of this shift by adducing evidence from a range of feminist literatures exploring early 20th century knowledge about women’s bodies and juxtaposing this literature to diverse contemporary discourses on gender mainstreaming, diversity management, and women in finance.
14:30 Tea & coffee
15:00 Panel: Resistence/Resilience/Reworking
Chair: Judith Squires with Wendy Larner, Maria Fannin and Julie MacLeavy
16:30 End
