America’s Carceral Landscapes keynote

Description

It will take place on November 1, 2019 from 5:30–7:30 pm at Allumni Hall 400, 121 St. Joseph Street.

“Rethinking the Carceral State in the Era of Authoritarianism.”

America’s Carceral Landscapes

This symposium seeks to historicize, map, and challenge the proliferation of carceral landscapes in the contemporary United States. The Trump administration’s response to a refugee crisis at the nation’s southern border, one precipitated by U.S. military intervention, political corruption, neoliberal economic policies, and climate change, has illustrated once again America’s perverse fascination with caging children of color. Millions of African American, Latinx, and Native American people, meanwhile, remain trapped in evolving regimes of mass incarceration that have enshrined “civil death” in American society. The U.S. military continues to detain thousands of enemy combatants across a vast network of detention centers that stretch from the Middle East to West Africa, and Guantanamo Bay. Even those activists and advocates contesting the nation’s vast carceral archipelago are enmeshed with social media platforms at the vanguard of what Shoshana Zuboff calls “surveillance capitalism.” The “carceral,” as Michel Foucault conceptualized it, is truly hegemonic. This interdisciplinary symposium brings together scholars uniquely positioned to help us map and historicize the current conjuncture: concentration camps at the border, systematic deportation, decarceration / relocation of citizen-captives to municipal jails, surveillance capitalism, and transnational, gendered regimes of incarceration.

No RSVP or registration needed.