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The graduate programme in Social and Political Thought at York University (Toronto) invites papers and art for its annual graduate student conference.
(In)Securities
Like the global itself, the term ‘security’ has come to operate at almost every possible level of social life. Perhaps to an unprecedented degree, the disjunctions and gaps between multifarious forms and levels of human ‘security’ are welded together under the blanket term. This term encompasses, among others: the individual subject (alienated, paranoid, identity-threatened), social movements (activism, migration, work), and the insecure associations of ‘free-democratic’ states in the face of perceived enemies. Can the contemporary obsession with security ever really be satisfied? What means will be employed in pursuit of this goal? How can we speak and act in security toward a democratic politics, or beyond it?
Possible themes could include:
Securities – political economy and capital investments and movements at the beginning of the twenty-first century (the mobility of capital, the
‘dot-com bubble’, computerization) and their relation to the problems of security in a wider sense.
Familiar (in)securities – the family and individual subject in global-local contexts.
(In)secure knowledge – academic and other forms of knowledge in an age
characterized by increasing specialization and commodification.
Security forces – private security, automated security, millitarization of policing, surveillance, detention, and punishment.
Sexual (in)securities – gender identity, queer theory, and contested
bodies.
Securing sites – property, territory, city planning, architecture,
institutions, and housing.
(In)secure movements – activism and political protest as criminal activity.
(In)secure borders – culture, race, ethnicity, nationality, refugees, and immigration in an age of hypermobility and immobility.
Criticizing Security
Please submit a 250 word abstract by December 31st, 2001. Art can be
proposed either in a written abstract or, in the case of completed
projects, by sending in slides. Applicants will be notified by February 1st, 2002. Submissions, or questions, should be sent to strategies2002@hotmail.com, or mailed to the above address.
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