We are delighted to announce our first colloquium of the Spring quarter, titled  ‘A New Urban Dispotif? Governing Life in an Age of Climate Change’ and given by Dr. Bruce Braun this Friday, 19 April at 3:30. The talk will be in Smith 304, with a reception to follow in Smith 409. Hope to see you there!

‘A New Urban Dispotif? Governing Life in an Age of Climate Change’

In an interview in 1977, Michel Foucault proposed the term dispositif for a heterogeneous set of discourses, practices, architectural forms, regulations, laws and knowledges connected together into an apparatus of government. Drawing upon later articulations of the concept by Gilles Deleuze and Giorgio Agamben, and exploring a range of innovations in the ‘management’ of urban life, this paper reworks Foucault’s concept as a means for understanding — and potentially contesting — new modes of government that have emerged in response to the crisis of climate change. Against understandings of ‘government’ in terms of a totalizing plan from which new practices and technologies usher forth, the paper instead emphasizes the ad hoc, and post-facto nature of ‘government’ as a set of diverse and loosely connected efforts to introduce ‘economy’ into existing relations in response to a perceived ‘crisis’. The paper concludes by exploring Agamben’s notion of ‘profanation’ as an adequate political response to the dispositif of resilient urbanism.

Mark your calendars for several great talks in the Department of Geography this quarter! You can look forward to the following speakers:

April 19:  Bruce Braun (includes brown bag)

April 26:  Workshop with CTL

May 3:  Tech workshop

May 10:  Ipsita Chatterjee (includes brown bag)

May 17:  Lucy Jarosz (this day there will also be a brown bag with Roger Lee who will be giving a campus wide talk earlier that week)

May 24:  Matt Townley

June 7:  Dena Aufseeser

Please check back closer to the talk for titles and abstracts. Unless otherwise noted, all colloquia take place in Smith Hall, Room 304 from 3:30-4:30.