Events / Past Colloquia

Winter 2009

Friday, May 15, 2009

To Make Live or Let Die? Rural Dispossession and the Protection of Surplus Population

A biopolitics of the population, when it succeeds in securing life and wellbeing, is surely a good thing. Although Foucault worried over excessive interference in peoples’ lives, beneficiaries of such a politics would probably prioritize being alive. Starting from the assumption that “making live” is a preserved possibility, my essay is a speculative attempt to explain the social forces that variously “make live” and “let die.” My focus is on rural Asia, where a new round of enclosures have dispossessed large numbers of people from access to land as a way to sustain their own lives, and neo-liberal policies have curtailed the subsidies that helped to sustain rural populations in the post-war “development decades.” At the same time, new jobs in manufacturing have not emerged to absorb this population. They are thus “surplus” to the needs of capital, and not plausibly described as a labour reserve. Who, then, would act to keep these people alive, and why would they act? To address this question I examine the set of social forces, the actors and agencies, that take on responsibility for the fate of surplus populations.

Tania Li is Professor of Anthropology and Canada Research Chair at the University of Toronto, Canada. She has published widely on questions of rural development, indigeneity, class and community, with a focus on Indonesia. Her most recent book is The Will to Improve: Governmentality, Development and the Practice of Politics, Duke University Press 2007.

Presented By: Tania Li
Professor of Anthropology and Canada Research Chair
University of Toronto, Canada

Friday, May 8, 2009

Blurring boundaries – A Conversation about Spatial and Social Justice

Never static or fixed, space is continuously produced by political, economic and social practices and discourses that lead to ideas of identity, belonging and power. The study of space, then, often leads geographers to interrogate issues of social and spatial justice. However, geographers are not alone in their study. Artists and activists have long been engaging in a struggle to bring issues of social and spatial injustices to light. To that end, the Department of Geography's Colloquium Committee is happy to present a panel discussion with artists Amy Balkin and Lize Mogel. Our conversation will explore their approaches and frameworks for working on social and spatial justice issues as well as spaces of collaboration.

San Francisco-based artist Amy Balkin’s projects consider how we occupy the social and material landscapes we inhabit. They include collaborative environmental justice audio tour Invisible-5 (invisible5.org), clean-air park Public Smog (publicsmog.org), and This the Public Domain (thisisthepublicdomain.org), an ongoing effort to initiate a permanent international public commons near Tehachapi, California. Her work has been included in the book Land, Art: A Cultural Ecology Handbook, and she has received grants from the Creative Work Fund and Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation.

Lize Mogel is an interdisciplinary artist who works with the interstices between art and cultural geography. She inserts and distributes and cartographic projects into public space and in publications. She is co-editor of the book/map collection "An Atlas of Radical Cartography" and co-curator of the internationally touring exhibition "An Atlas". Exhibitions include the Gwangju Bienniale (South Korea,) common room (NYC), Casco (Netherlands), and ³Experimental Geography² (ICI, touring).

Presented By: Amy Balkin and Lize Mogel

Friday, May 1, 2009

Civil Society, Savage City: the depoliticization of dispossession in Chennai, India

An emphasis on good governance has become central to the policy prescriptions and reform agendas of organizations like the World Bank. Reforms to governance often imagine a central role for civil society and other non-state actors. Spurred on by increased funding as well as new political opportunities, India has witnessed an expansion of its NGO sector. There is a great deal of diversity among and between NGOs, but the focus here is NGOs who make reforming urban governance the aim of their political energies. Through this focus, these NGOs have become important mediators of the relationship between the state and capital, particularly around issues of urban development. This mediation comes in the context of the growing significance of Indian cities as sites of foreign and domestic investment and the resulting intensification of contests over city space. A case study of the Adyar Poonga wetland project in Chennai, India shows how the relationship between NGOs, the local state, and the private sector served to circumvent political challenges to land dispossession.

Presented By: Rowan Ellis
Department of Geography
University of Washington
Friday, April 24, 2009

Geography Graduate Student Panel: the UW Experience

This week's Colloquium is a panel for graduate students, by graduate students, about the graduate student experience in our department. We have gathered a group of senior graduate students to share their experiences on the following topics:

Writing, Submitting and Getting Your Article Published
Forming Committees Getting Funding Generals, Prelims, and Proposal Oh My!
Transition from Masters to Phd
and many more!

Our panelists include Matthew Wilson, Caroline Faria, Stephen Young, and Annie Bartos.

Please come with questions and any thoughts you may have about the graduate student experience.

Department of Geography
University of Washington
Friday, April 17, 2009

Place Resonance: Examining the substance and shadows of place-based feeling

This paper describes my efforts to come to grips with the emotionally resonant places of the Royal Canadian Legion, a veteran’s association. I explore what I call ‘place resonance’ as a point of analytic departure. ‘Place resonance’ acknowledges the “tangle of potential connections” (Stewart 2007: 4) in place; the “continuous responding to something not quite already given and yet somehow happening” (Stewart 2007: 127). From this point of departure, how do we understand shared places and their emotional resonance? How do we feel in touch, if at varying speeds and intensities (e.g. Forlizzi et al. 452) reflectively or unconsciously, and what can an investigation of place add to this?

I am seeking to understand this in reference to those who (temporarily and variously) inhabit the Legions, and also, in terms of a research process where “[w]hat we touch is always moving, unpredictable, irreducible, and mysteriously opaque” (Back 2007: 3). This resulting discussion is intended to further question geographies of emotion and subjectivity, and to consider what is both substantial and shadowy, about feeling in place.

Presented By: Dr. Deborah Thien
Graduate Program Coordinator
Department of Geography
California State University, Long Beach
Friday, April 10, 2009

Open Discussion of Graduate Program Issues

Presented By: Steve Herbert
Graduate Program Coordinator
Department of Geography
University of Washington
Friday, April 3, 2009

Driving Labor: Neoliberal Initiatives, ‘Thai’ Values, and Economic Realities for Bangkok’s Taxi Drivers

Geography and Geographical Names: Historical and Global Dimensions

National Identity, Migration, and Place: U.S. Immigrants in Canada

Imagined Villages: Producing Rule in Tanzanian Maasailand

In northern Tanzania, relations between Maasai communities and international tourism companies turn on the centrality of the village as a legitimate and meaningful unit of identity, belonging and rights. The desire of small eco-tourism investors to gain access to wildlife resources outside of national protected areas enabled partnerships that helped shape the contours of local claims for control over land and wildlife. Drawing on ethnographic research, I argue that Villagization, the process to codify village boundaries with forms of belonging and production that are both visible to the state and complicit with state development agendas, has been more successful under neoliberal economic development than it was under state socialism, when it was the explicit focus of development efforts. I will show how resistance to state development policies by certain Maasai groups helped to produce the village as a meaningful unit of belonging, production and rights. In this paper I show how the hard won political battles in the name of indigenous and local rights has led to the narrowing of political possibilities, the fragmentation of important ecological resources, and emergent forms of violence along newly accentuated lines of difference.

Presented By: Ben Gardner
Interdisciplinary Arts & Sciences
University of Washington - Bothell
Friday, February 13, 2009

THE ISRAEL-PALESTINE CONFLICT IN THE AMERICAN MEDIA: The Portrayal of Israeli and Palestinian Suffering and Mutual Violence in Selected Daily Newspapers in the USA

This paper argues that editors of newspapers in the U.S., in their capacity to select and arrange news related to tragic events in Palestine/Israel, tend to follow an underlying political agenda largely conforming with the US foreign policy towards Israel, the Palestinians and the Arab or Moslem worlds more generally. This is part of a popular American geopolitical imaginary, now being reconfigured through the primacy of ‘terror’ as the enemy number one of the American way of life. And most certainly, by proxy, of the Israeli way of life or the life of any Washington-oriented democracy. Reportage on cases of Palestinian tragedy and agony were represented as part of or the byproduct of protracted conflict within a kind of historical amnesia or bracketing out: Israeli state policy which acts to victimize the Palestinians tends to be rendered invisible in such manipulation of reported reality. In other words, a deft editorial arrangement deflects possible blame on Israel by removing the events from their broader context and time frame. The reports center on symptoms of the pathology rather than its underlying causes. This tends to obscure Israeli state responsibility for Palestinian suffering, through its protracted policies of occupation and land expropriation. By marked contrast, newspaper editors may privilege dramatic headlines for reports when Israeli victims are involved, seeking to highlight the identity of those responsible for the violence. Such reportage tends to provide a basis for Israeli government positions, which argue that ‘retaliation’ by the Israeli army as part of defense of the population. They are at the front line, like the United States, in the war against ‘terror.’

Presented by: Ghazi Walid-Falah
Department of Geography and Planning
University of Akron
Friday, February 6, 2009

Evaluating the Use of Handheld GIS in Humanitarian Demining

Late in 2003, a research team at the University of Kansas (KU) was contracted by the Geneva International Centre for Humanitarian Demining (GICHD) to evaluate a newly developed handheld computer system for conducting demining-related field surveys. The system's three main components, a Pocket PC, GPS, and Laser Rangefinders, can be used to complete data entry forms (report date, name of reporter, environmental conditions, type of ordnance, etc.) and collect related geographic information (reference point / landmark, benchmark, hazard perimeter, etc.) describing mined areas.

After developing a testing routine, this system was evaluated by the KU team locally and on foreign field deployments (Chile, Albania, Ecuador and Lebanon) from 2004-2007. This unique project has permitted involvement at both the operations and research level, giving access to observe and take part in the complete cycle of development, deployment, testing and redesign of the handheld GIS. This research will provide a significant contribution to those working specifically with the GICHD handheld system, and, more broadly, to others working with handheld GIS and geographic field data collection.

Presented by: Matt Dunbar
GIS Specialist, CSDE
University of Washington
PhD Candidate
University of Kansas
Friday, January 30, 2009

Demystifying the IRB Human Subjects approval process

Q & A

Presented by: Tanya Matthews
Human Subjects Review Administrator
University of Washington
Friday, January 23, 2009

Reconfiguring Urban Governance in a Time of Socio-Environmental Transformation: A Study of Highway Politics and "Climate Action" in Seattle

This paper asserts that we are experiencing a neoliberalization of urban environmental governance in U.S. cities. By this I refer to the increasing number of programs which work by enlisting urban residents as active participants in forms of self-governance deemed to be more environmentally benign or sustainable. Programs to encourage such transformations in behavior and subjectivity position the state not as a regulator of the market's environmental externalities, but rather as a cultivator of particular kinds of environmentally-aware consumers who participate in, and therefore help to shape, the market. Through the examination of two interrelated case studies, I analyze both the mechanisms through which this neoliberalization works as well as its social and political implications. The first case is a prolonged debate over how to replace an earthquake-damaged waterfront highway in downtown Seattle, Washington. I find that an informal alliance emerges between developers and property owners seeking the economic benefits of removing the elevated highway and environmentalists seeking to reduce the automobile usage in the city. Drawing on Hajer's concept of a "discourse coalition" I analyze how this alliance works to structure the debate in such a way that systematically marginalizes alternative storylines focused on distributive social and economic justice. The second case concerns the creation and implementation of Seattle's Climate Action Plan, a set of policies aimed as reducing carbon emissions produced within the city. Here I find a discourse of personal and collective environmental responsibility is mobilized to both attract and cultivate urban residents who embrace the kinds of urban development valorized by the anti-elevated highway discourse coalition. I conclude with a discussion of how these findings extend current theorizations of urban (environmental) governance. I also call for the exploration of new political pathways which overcome barriers impeding creative alliances between campaigns for social justice and environmental sustainability.

Presented by: Kevin Ramsey
PhD Candidate, Geography, University of Washington

Friday, January 16, 2009

Neoliberal Governance, the Global Trope, and Black Ghettos: the Recent Rust Belt Experience

Today, in the shadows of gleaming downtown skyscrapers and showy gentrified neighborhoods, many poor African-American communities in America's Rust Belt experience an intensification of poverty and deprivation. This talk suggests that these communities more deeply bleed with a bolstered functional logic ascribed to them, to warehouse "contaminants" in the "globally-compelled" city restructuring. A key rhetorical trigger is identified in current neoliberal times - global-speak - which today is posited as a central mechanism in the systematic control and management of these communities.

Presented by: David Wilson
Department of Geography
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Friday, January 9, 2009

Autumn 2008

Mobility, Masculinity, and the Everyday Geopolitics of Debt

This presentation explores how credit/debt circulates globally. Drawing on fieldwork in rural India, I show how young men are increasingly involved in microfinance lending, acting as the intermediaries who move capital between urban centers are village credit groups. I argue that this is producing new entrepreneurial identities among young men based on their sense of mobility, whilst also re-inscribing women's entrepreneurship as local/domestic.

Presented by: Stephen Young
PhD Candidate, Geography, University of Washington

Friday, October 31st, 2008

Funding your Graduate School Career

This week's colloquium is dedicate to an exploration of the resources available to graduates for funding their time here in the department. Join Helene Obradovich from the Graduate School and Claire Miccio from Graduate Fellowship and Information Service in a discussion about funding all stages of your graduate work, including course work, research, and writing. The workshop will detail specific fellowship opportunities as well as strategies for locating other funding possibilities.

Presented By: Helene O'Bradovich and Claire Miccio
UW Graduate School and Grants and Information Service

Friday, October 24th, 2008

Making Law, Making Place: An Agenda for Legal Geography

This presentation outlines a conceptual framework for theorizing the role of lawyers in legal geography research to foster better understandings of the processes and the people co-constituting space and law. We argue that the practice of law is missing from existing legal geography scholarship. Adding insights from legal studies and urban regime theory, we propose an agenda for research that places lawyers at the center of analyses of legal (and political) claims-making, particularly place-claims in land use disputes. Drawing from new research on conflicts over the siting of group homes in Massachusetts, I explore and illustrate preliminary findings using this theoretical framework. Multiple actors, from lawyers to neighborhood activists, social service agency staff, and city officials, all actively interpret and critique the law and its spatial effects in their disputes.

Presented By: Deb Martin
Clark University
Department of Geography

Friday October 10th, 2008

NEW U.S. MILITARY BASES: SIDE EFFECTS OR CAUSES OF WAR?

Since 1990, each large-scale U.S. military intervention (in the Persian Gulf, Balkans, Central Asia and Iraq) has left behind a string of new U.S. military bases in a region where the Pentagon had never before had a substantial foothold. When viewed collectively, the base clusters outline a new U.S. "sphere of influence," wedged geographically between the emerging economic competitors in the European Union and East Asia. Were the bases built to wage the wars, or were the wars waged to station the bases?

Presented By: Zoltan Grossman
The Evergreen State College
Professor of Geography and American Indian Studies

Friday October 10th, 2008

Banished: Zoning Out Disorder in Contemporary Seattle

"Disorderly" people are increasingly being banned from various public and private spaces in Seattle and other cities. Once banned, individuals are subject to arrest if they re-emerge. Three key mechanisms are used to accomplish banishment in Seattle: parks exclusions orders; criminal trespass; and off-limits orders. Although these work to notably increase the territorial authority of the police, they only exacerbate the challenges that disadvantaged citizens face. The practice of banishment therefore deserves sustained scrutiny and critique.

Presented By: Steve Herbert
University of Washington
Department of Geography/Law, Society and Justice

Friday October 3rd, 2008

Winter 2008

Mappa-loquium: Finding our way with new mappings of geographical learning

This is a collaborative colloquium presentation through which we hope to enable a broader departmental conversation over the use of multimedia mapping technologies for teaching. It builds on a faculty workshop last summer designed to foster the use of geovisualization technologies in geography classes that do not have a specific GIS focus. It also draws on the experiences some of us have had in developing online mapping projects in our teaching, both here in Seattle and on this year¹s Geography Department study abroad program in Rome. Together we hope to stimulate discussion over both technology and teaching methods, and, just as we want to stress the enabling aspects of cartographic creativity, we would also like to enable further departmental innovation in cartographic pedagogies.

Presented By:Sarah Elwood, Katharyne Mitchell, Matt Spark and Matt Wilson
University of Washington
Department of Geography

Friday May 30, 2008

Environment and Sustainable Development: A Comparison of Taiwan with Hong Kong and China

East Asia is a paradigm in many ways of the costs of development sweeping the world, resulting in rapid urbanization and industrialization, followed by severe environmental degradation and pollution. Taiwan, following in Japan’s footsteps, has had some of the world’s worst environmental problems, with the PRC and Hong Kong following suit. The three states have widely different geographies, political and economic systems, and environmental programs. All three began to really address the environment only in the 1980s. Taiwan has come the furthest, China the least. All three states aspire to sustainable development, but none are close to reaching that goal. China faces the most daunting challenges.

Presented By:Jack Williams, Ph.D.
Michigan State University

Friday May 16, 2008

"On The Return of the Food Riot"

The return to the streets of one of the oldest forms of protest in human history, the food riot, should not come as a surprise. While the structural factors behind the price rises appear random, the conjunction of oil price rises, biofuel policy, meat consumption, poor harvest and financial speculation could, to varying degrees, be predicted and mitigated. More seriously, the policy architecture to weather this storm has been undermined by thirty years of neoliberal development policy. The structure and motive of food riots today looks similar to that in eighteenth century England and the twentieth century United States, and absent some fundamental changes in development policy, we should expect to see many more such riots.

Presented By:Raj Patel

Friday May 9th, 2008

Disciplined Insurgency: Can a College of the Environment Change the World?

Among the most dramatic transformations of the disciplinary landscape of the American University in a generation, possibly a century, is that organized around the term “environment.” In the last decade at least eight of the preeminent universities in the US have created colleges with that nomenclature. Better late than never, many faculty and students say. Responding to faculty interest, the Provost of the University of Washington is leading the change here arguing that it will create “synergies” between units with environmental expertise through collaborative research, more integrated and efficiently delivered education. Focused on the connections between “discovery, development, and application to real world problems,” the new College of the Environment will also demonstrate the relevance of the UW to private and public sector sources of funding, the Provost argues.

Taking a political ecology approach, this talk asks why environmental colleges have appeared in recent years, and if they might advance the insurgent knowledges that various threads of environmentalism – including ecology, conservation, and recent geography – promised would challenge the growth imperatives and inequalities produced by capitalism. The case of the UW, and our Department of Geography, will be examined in depth. Isn’t it strange that geography and environment evoke such different meanings to professional geographers at UW!

Is insurgency possible if the goal is to appeal to private philanthropists, corporations, and federal agencies? Can the College of the Environment change the world if its funding is largely private? What role might the Department of Geography and other insurgent disciplines play to answer “yes?”

Presented By: Doug Mercer, Ph.D.
Department of Geography
School of Aquatic and Fisheries Sciences University of Washington

Friday April 25, 2008

Transition of Travel Destinations of Japanese Package Tours in China by Newspaper Advertisements

This research assumes to clarify the distribution of visiting destinations from 1980 to 2004 by package tours in newspaper advertisement. We analyze the advertisement inserted in Asahi Shimbun (Tokyo version). Because the China visit package tour was published for the first time in 1980, we collected the advertisements in 1980, 1984, 1994 and 2004. According to the statistic data by JTB (Japan Tourism Bureau) and JNTO (Japan National Tourist Organization), March, August and November are always peak periods of China travel to Japanese tourists. Therefore, we select the advertisements published in January, June and October, which are two months before peak periods as our research objects. First of all, Hong Kong played the role of gateway or relay city in the age when the infrastructure in China was insufficiently equipped. Hong Kong didn't appear in the advertisement of China travel in 2004, and it can be thought as a result of the improvement of infrastructure in China. Secondly, tourism policy of Chinese government also accomplished important role in destinations change. Thirdly, the registration of World Heritage influenced destination selection of China travel. There were only 6 World Heritages in China in 1987, but the number of World Heritages increased to 30 in 2004 with a rapid and aimed speed. Fourthly, effect can be recognized in the tourism promotion activities of Chinese government. Fifthly, mass communication media in sending country Japan is also an important factor which can't be disregarded.

Presented By: Guoqing Du
College of Tourism, Rikkyo University, Japan

Friday April 11, 2008

Personal Firewall: How hackers are re-imagining risk in the information society

My ethnographic research with computer hackers in the United States reveals a peculiar set of motivations, anxieties, and geopolitical imaginaries. I draw upon the writing of Ulrich Beck and Anthony Giddens on the Risk Society to help understand the dynamics behind the preference shared by hackers for specific political responses to electronic risk. The politics of risk championed by my interview subjects focuses on individualized, rather than collective solutions to these potential threats. The "personal firewall" emerges as both a technical solution and a powerful metaphor for the redistribution of risk to individual consumers in the information society.

Presented By: Kris Erickson, PhC
University of Washington

Friday April 4, 2008

The Triumph of the Egg

At the turn of the twentieth century, cold storage warehouses went up in cities across the United States, bringing urban consumers year-round access to perishable provisions. Among these foods were eggs. While Americans used cold and other means to preserve food at home, many viewed the refrigerated warehouses with great suspicion. They saw the very notion of durable freshness, today so taken-for-granted, for what it is: a paradox, and one that suggested either deception, the disturbing manipulation of markets and nature, or both. And in the case of eggs, the rise of cold storage did in fact unleash an assortment of questionable trade practices. This talk examines the technological changes that first threatened the moral economy of fresh food marketing and then resolved, at least temporarily, the resulting controversies. It also situates the egg's story in the broader history of freshness.

Presented By: Susanne Freidberg
Associate Professor of Geography at Dartmouth College

Author of French Beans and Food Scares: Culture and Commerce in an Anxious Age (2004).

Friday February 29, 2008

Global R&D in China

Labour Market Convergence in a Cross-Border Region: the Case of Cascadia’s Forest Products Industry

The emergence of supranational institutions and the resurgence of regionally-based economies has created a growing body of literature related to cross-border regions. Cross-border regions exist throughout the world, but some of the most prominent exist in the EU and along the Canada-U.S. border. Cross-border regions are comprised of contiguous sub-national units of territory from more than one nation-state. Cross-border regions share strong economic, political, social, historical, and environmental similarities. This project examines the extent to which convergence is occurring in four labour market segments of the forest products industry in the cross-border region of Cascadia. Cascadia is comprised of British Columbia, Washington, and Oregon. The four segments include: pulp and paper, lumber production, logging, and reforestation. The forest products industry provides an interesting case when examining labour market convergence in a cross-border regions because of the similar market foci, ownership patterns, and costs of parent firms throughout the region. Additionally, and critical to the purposes of this study, are the similarity of divisions in the industry’s primary (e.g. pulp and paper, sawmills) and secondary (e.g. logging, reforestation) labour market segments. The framework for this study draws upon Peck’s (1996) work on labour market segmentation and Gertler’s (2001) work on cross-national convergence. The purpose of this paper is to present the framework, research methods, and preliminary results of this study. Primary information for this paper is drawn from in-depth interviews with representatives of forest products firms, labour union officials, production workers, and logging and reforestation contractors.

Presented by: Brendan Sweeney

January 25, 2008

Till Class do us Part: Youth and The Politics of Waiting in India

Processes of global and regional social change have radically altered young people's prospects and their experience of time and space. Nowhere is this more evident than in the instance of the large number of educated youth unable to obtain secure salaried work. In places as diverse as Morocco, Argentina, France and India there are now a large number of young people, most of them men, who have been conditioned to expect secure salaried work but who, in the absence of other opportunities, seemingly spend much of their time "hanging out" - on street corners, in universities or while conducting part-time work that bears little relation to their ambitions. Drawing on four years of field research conducted between 1996 and 2007 in western Uttar Pradesh, India, I refer in this paper to a public culture of waiting among educated un/underemployed young men and discuss two forms of politics that have emerged out of their sense of marginalization. First, there have been efforts by un/under-employed university students, across lines of class and caste, to protest against regional processes of economic restructuring with specific reference to their position as "students" and "youth", a type of politics that resonates with Partha Chatterjee's ideas of political society. Second, a range of class- and caste-interested forms of political engagement have emerged among disappointed young men that fracture a broader student movement, and I use this point to discuss the continued heuristic value of the ideas of Pierre Bourdieu for an analysis of youth mobilization. I also appeal for a closer focus on how time and space are implicated in youth political practice.

Presented by: Craig Jeffrey, Associate Professor of Geography and International Studies University of Washington

Time and venue: January, 18,

Colloquium committee and GGSA present:

Tanya Matthews from Human Subjects
Presentation and Q&A for grad students

This Friday the colloquium committee and GGSA are pleased to announce a presentation and question answer session with Tanya Matthews of Human Subjects. I know from personal experience that Tanya is extremely helpful and knowledgeable on this topic and she is especially knowledgeable about how to aid geographers in navigating this complex process.

**Please note that Tanya would like us to read the Belmont Report, which is available at: http://www.hhs.gov/ohrp/humansubjects/guidance/belmont.htm.  The Belmont report is an easy three page read and it will help everyone understand the philosophical underpinnings of the U.S. research regulations, and the review process.

Friday Jan 11th, 3-4:30 pm
Smith 304

We will follow with a happy hour on the Ave.

Autumn 2007

Unfamiliar Bonds: Social reproduction and the reconfiguration of floral sex work in South India

India is the only country in the world where cotton seeds, planted to grow the commercial fiber crop, are hybrids, manufactured each season through the laborious process of manually cross-pollinating two varieties. This process, which I call floral sex work, is mainly done by children, mostly girls. Naturally. “Seed pillalu” (seed-children, in Telugu) tend to be migrants from dry villages whose labor is “tied” or bonded for the season. The processes through which children are being inexorably disarticulated from their homes, from schooling, and from childhood in the seed cotton economy is a wrenching, if simple, tale to tell. It is being told to good effect by NGOs, local and international, and a range of other actors: the government, multilateral agencies, transnational and domestic private seed corporations, and politicians. A hitherto untold story is how floral sex work is being done by adult, “low-caste” men and women on small-holder family plots. Familial bonds and gendered bodies are being re-articulated, spatialized, and experienced in multiple ways in this new agrarian regime. My paper, based on ethnographies of floral sex workers, theorizes social reproduction without assuming it is the same process across geographic and cultural terrains. If social re-production is not simply functional to capitalism how do we think about the myriad forms of meaning making that come to suture and disrupt contemporary agrarian capitalisms?

Presented by: Priti Ramamurthy
Women Studies and South Asia Program University of Washington

Friday November 30, 2007

Spaces of Hope: Ex-combatants and Urban Utopias in Contemporary West Africa

Presented by: Daniel Hoffman, PhD
Department of Anthropology, UW

Friday November 16, 2007

Placing the Prison: Neoliberal Governance, Racialized Exclusion, and Prison Development in the Rural American Northwest

Presented by: Anne Bonds, PhC

About the speaker:
Anne Bonds, PhC
Department of Geography
University of Washington

The staggering number of prisoners and correctional facilities in the United States is transforming the geographies of both urban and rural landscapes. As the trend in mass incarceration persists, depressed rural spaces are increasingly associated with rising prison development and the increasing criminalization of rural communities of disadvantage. Drawing on in-depth archival and interview research in three communities in the American Northwest, I explore how prison development intersects with the neoliberal restructuring of rural economies and governance as well local politics of race and poverty. I examine rural prison expansion in conjunction with the prioritization of competitive economic development strategies, shifting access to resources, and the deepening of social exclusion for certain groups. I focus on how local leaders and community residents represent the reframing of public policy towards competitive, market-based models and how these discourses are constructed in the context of job loss and declining tax revenues, increasing competition for investment, as well as local histories and social relations. I argue that these narratives reinforce rural prison expansion as rural communities increasingly adopt economic strategies that re-entrench racialized and classed inequality and the marginalization of already disadvantaged communities.

Friday November 9, 2007

Computer Models and Biomedicine: Mapping the Body as Data in Contemporary Scientific Practice

Presented by: Marko Monteiro, PhD

Both space and place are in question in this project, as well as practices of visualizing/mapping, because of the way the new surgical procedure will involve two separate cities, and the way the research itself is being done between cities. As far as the digital renderings go, I will talk about the contemporary twist in visual cultures of science brought about by digital modeling. Digital technologies at the same time erase notions of space, distance, volume (through the idea of doing telemedicine for example), but bring them back into contemporary knowledge practices through the way the scientists navigate 3D renderings as actual "volumes" and "spaces" in their everyday practice.
Latour's concept of inscriptions guide me in the analysis, and he analyzes the concept through also explaining the place maps have had in scientific culture. Also, geological data is used all the time in comparison with biological data by the scientists in their work.
Modeling is heavily used in geological sciences, and thus the scientists must adapt some of these techniques when doing the same with biological "places" and functions.

About the speaker:
Marko Monteiro, PhD
Postdoctoral Researcher, Science, Technology and Society Program

"My work is focused mostly on the relationships between representations and bodies. I have done research on gender and masculinities in Brazil, looking at how men's representations changed in the 1960's, influenced by feminism and gay identities, and how contemporary representations of men (in the 1990's) were constructed though journalistic work in a Brazilian magazine. I have also worked on scientific representations of the body enabled by new technologies, focusing on biotechnologies, medical technologies and how scientific representations enable the manipulation of the bodily matter in specific ways. I am currently involved in field research in a computer science laboratory at the University of Texas at Austin, where a new cancer treatment is being developed based on computer modeling."

Friday November 2, 2007