"Melodrama and the Politics of National Security

Transcription

1 GEORGE MASON UNIVERSITY CULTURAL STUDIES PhD Program Faculty/Student Colloquium 2015/16 Location of All Events: Johnson Center, Meeting Room D Time of All Events: 4:30-6 pm Sept 24th, 2015 ELISABETH ANKER (George Washington U, American Studies and Political Science) "Melodrama and the Politics of National Security Professor Anker is author of Orgies of Feeling: Melodramatic Politics and the Pursuit of Freedom (Duke UP, 2014) October 15th, 2015 CRAIG WILLSE (George Mason U, Cultural Studies) Our very own Professor Willse will present and discuss his brand new book, The Value of Homelessness: Managing Surplus Life in the United States (U. Minnesota P., 2015) There will be a free raffle of 2 signed copies of the book.

2 October 29th, 2015 Shibboleth week 1 Neoliberalism Perhaps the piece of jargon you re most likely to hear in the academy today is the term neoliberalism. But what does it really signify? In an attempt to make some definitional progress, program faculty will address the ways in which their own work engages the term neoliberalism. November 5th, 2015 JORDAN CAMP (Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity in America, and the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs, Brown University) "Theorizing the Current Conjuncture: Freedom Struggles and the Rise of the Neoliberal State" Dr Camp is completing his first book for the University of California Press, Incarcerating the Crisis: Racism, Security, Prisons, and the Second Reconstruction. This talk is co-sponsored by the African and African American Studies Program.

3 November 19th, 2015 DANIEL ZAMORA (Jacobin Magazine) "Neoliberal Foucault Daniel Zamora is a doctoral candidate in Sociology at the Université Libre de Bruxelles. His book Critiquer Foucault: Les années 1980 et la tentation néolibérale is available for Kindle at Amazon. His volume edited with M.C. Behrent, Foucault and Neoliberalism, is forthcoming from Polity. February 11th, 2016 EMILY LORDI (English Department, U. Massachusetts, Amherst) The Meaning of Soul in American Culture Dr Lordi is author of Black Resonance: Iconic Women Singers and African American Literature (Rutgers U P, 2013) This talk is co-sponsored by the African and African American Studies Program.

4 February 25th, 2016 Shibboleth week 2 Immaterial Labor Although it is undeniably central to discussions of digital culture and to debates about the nature of labor in contemporary culture, the term immaterial labor still causes a lot of confusion and disagreement. Students and faculty from the program will offer some ways of defining, understanding and deploying the term. March 17th, 2016 Annual Program Recruitment Event Featured speaker, alumnus ROB GEHL (U. of Utah) Professor Gehl ( graduated from our program in 2010 and was recently tenured in the Communication department at he University of Utah. He is the author of Reverse Engineering Social Media (Temple U.P., 2014)

5 March 24th, 2016 ALEXANDER WEHELIYE (African American Studies, Northwestern U.) "Black Life" Professor Weheliye is the author of Phonographies: Grooves in Sonic Afro-Modernity (Duke U.P., 2005), which was awarded The Modern Language Association's William Sanders Scarborough Prize for Outstanding Scholarly Study of Black American Literature or Culture and Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the Human (Duke UP, 2014). This talk is co-sponsored by the African and African American Studies Program.

6 April 7th, 2016 BENJAMIN BREWER (Sociology, James Madison U) "Craft Economies and Global Commodity Chains Dr Brewer is an economic sociologist working on world-historical and world-systemic social change, global inequalities, sport, popular culture. Much of his work has focused on changes in the global division of labor and their impact on the global distribution of wealth, status and power. His talk will be from a new project examining handmade bicycle builders and their position within the global bike trade. You can read more about this work on the project blog: Handbuilding Value.