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Upcoming Lecture: ‘Sensational economy? Ethics, politics and economic geographies’ by Roger Lee

Lee Roger PhotoSensational economy? Ethics, politics and economic geographies

Roger Lee
Queen Mary, University of London UK

Wednesday, May 15, 2013, 7-8:30 pm Kane Hall Room 210
Reception to follow in the Walker-Ames Room

Scholarly practices of framing may not only be restrictive and misleading but, if devoid of sentience and geography, also ignore insights into a range of influences on human understanding and practice and of political possibilities for change. Such is certainly the case with most theorizations/conceptualizations of economic practices. But can sentient dependency be reconciled with the imperative of economic sustainability across space and time? This question involves the determination in the first instance by the economic, a conception which enables a politics that is radical and open yet not divorced from economic imperatives. Such a space for a politics of value reflects the ‘ordinary economy’ – the formative intersection of values and the practice of Theories of Value in the construction of economic geographies. But the practical question remains: how to mobilize a real politics of economic change which is itself sustainable across space and through time?

Roger Lee is Emeritus Professor of Geography, Queen Mary, University of London.  He is an intellectual leader in economic geography and has published extensively on topics relating to global-local ties, and informal local economic networks. In particular, his work on integrating cultural and social geography into mainstream economic geography is path-breaking and helped produce a whole new area of research in geography. He is also an extraordinarily interdisciplinary thinker and the author of numerous books that tie economic geography to emerging research themes in anthropology, sociology and cultural studies. He has served as an editor of several journals and consultant for academic publishers and governments. He is currently the chief editor of the Sage Handbook of Human Geography, scheduled for publication in 2013.

This lecture is free and open to the public

For further information contact: kwchan@uw.edu

Sponsored by the Earl & Edwina Stice Memorial Lectureship in Social Sciences

Upcoming Colloquium: Dr. Ipsita Chatterjee on ‘Science, Religion, and the Ideology of Urban Governance’

This Friday (May 10th) Professor Ipsita Chatterjee will be giving a talk in our colloquium. Ipsita received her PhD in Geography at Clark University and she is an assistant professor in the Department of Geography and the Environment at the University of Texas. She is also affiliated with South Asia Institute.
 
The title of her talk is “Science, Religion and the Ideology of Urban Governance: Tales from a Globalizing Ahmedabad City, India” (abstract below).
 
The talk will take place in Smith 304 at 3.30 pm and as usual a reception will follow in Smith 409.
Science, Religion and the Ideology of Urban Governance: Tales from a Globalizing Ahmedabad City, India

The ‘new urban politics’ literature highlights local entrepreneurialism as the basis of neo-liberal urbanism; my talk will add to this literature by demonstrating how entrepreneurial neo-liberalism and ethno-religiosity are inflected in governance. I propose two concepts: ‘governance as performed’ (practice of ethno-religious entrepreneurialism) and ‘governance as inscribed’ (documenting policy through scientific planning). The dialectical interplay between ‘performance’ and ‘inscription’ defines the terrain of ‘new urban governance’ in its global/local entirety. Using examples from Ahmedabad city, India, my talk will explicate how ‘governance as performed’ and ‘governance as inscribed’, produce dual narratives of the ‘lived’ and the ‘inscribed’ city. The narrative of abstract and objective Ahmedabad inscribed in planning documents directly contradicts the ‘grubby practices’ of entrepreneurial, ethno-religious neo-liberalism performed in the city. By simultaneously analysing both narratives, my talk proposes to demystify the contexts of exclusion, thus exposing injustice embedded in ‘new urban politics’.

Upcoming Colloquium: A New Urban Dispotif? Governing Life in an Age of Climate Change by Bruce Braun

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.

Spring Colloquium Series

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.

 
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