THIS EVENT HAS BEEN CANCELED DUE TO A MEDICAL CHALLENGE

Please join the Committee on Social Theory for the third speaker in our Spring 2024 Speaker Series on the theme of Global Asias happening on Friday, April 12 at 2 pm ET in the UKAA Auditorium in the William T. Young Library with Dr. Michael M.J. Fischer!

This series will be featuring guest speakers engaging with interdisciplinary approaches across the humanities and social sciences to address the intensified contestation about Asia in light of the shifting geopolitical dynamics in the Asia-Pacific area and globally. The framing seminar which incorporates these guest speakers, ST 690/ MCL 525/ GWS 595: Global Asias, is co-taught by Dr. Liang Luo and Dr. Charlie Yi Zhang. 

Lecture Abstract

This talk presents the outline of my sojourns (both longer and shorter) in Singapore and Southeast Asia over the past decade and the larger research project with which I was engaged. I will start with a prequel, then talk about the two books, and end with thoughts, if I have time, about a third book which was supposed to have been the first, on theater – theater because theater is a spot, a space, or a set of tactics of social and cultural critique, in which different positions, political positions, sexual mores, and other social tensions can be staged and where liberalization of society can be leveraged. Why Singapore? what is Singapore that we should be mindful of it? It is a tiny if very important node in global logistics, oil and finance. Once caught in the vice of the Cold War, and now again in the emerging new Cold War, between arguments about political modes of governance and hard geopolitics that I allude to in the title of the 2nd book, following current geopolitics (and the Obama administration’s announcement of a pivot to Southeast Asia and the South China Sea) and a struggle between East and West, meaning in this case between China and the United States. I’ll begin in the heady optimistic days around 2009 when I was first going to Singapore with three questions that I initially used to describe my larger project: how to create a new world class scientific community which Singapore was attempting to do; how to reform the university system from teaching universities to world competitive research universities; and thirdly how to create a space for an art scene that functions as public space for social and cultural critique, and how that art scene could have an effect in changing the local social imaginary or what I was still calling the social common sense or sensus communis.

Please join the Committee on Social Theory for the fourth, and final, speaker in our Spring 2024 Speaker Series on the theme of Global Asias happening on Friday, April 19 at 2 pm ET in the UK AA Alumni Auditorium at the William T. Young Library with Dr. Tansen Sen! 

This series will be featuring guest speakers engaging with interdisciplinary approaches across the humanities and social sciences to address the intensified contestation about Asia in light of the shifting geopolitical dynamics in the Asia-Pacific area and globally. The framing seminar which incorporates these guest speakers, ST 690/ MCL 525/ GWS 595: Global Asias, is co-taught by Dr. Liang Luo and Dr. Charlie Yi Zhang.

Title: A Global Asia Travelogue: Gita Bandyopadhyay and Her Travels in China in 1949–50

Lecture Abstract:
Gita Bandyopadhyay was the first Indian and most likely also the first woman from independent India to pen a travelogue on recently liberated China. Entitled Moskow theke Chin (From Moscow to China), the travelogue, written in Bengali, recounts Bandyopadhyay’s visit to the People’s Republic of China (PRC) to attend the 1949 Conference of Women of Asia held in Beijing. The details about the conference, her meetings with various Chinese women, and her visits to other Chinese cities provide unique perspectives on the PRC. The travelogue also presents Bandyopadhyay’s critical views on the newly established Nehru government and demonstrates the brewing relationship between the PRC government and the leftist movement in India. This presentation examines the importance of this neglected travelogue to underscore the contributions of women to China–India interactions, the role of non-state actors in these exchanges, and the state of China–India relations prior to the establishment of diplomatic relations between the two countries. It also examines Bandyopadhyay's global connections with members of the feminist movement in Europe and the United States of America.

Please join the Committee on Social Theory for the second speaker in our Spring 2024 Speaker Series on the theme of Global Asias happening on Friday, March 1 at 2 pm ET in B&E Room 191 in the Gatton Business School with Dr. Arnika Fuhrmann! 

This series will be featuring guest speakers engaging with interdisciplinary approaches across the humanities and social sciences to address the intensified contestation about Asia in light of the shifting geopolitical dynamics in the Asia-Pacific area and globally. The framing seminar which incorporates these guest speakers, ST 690/ MCL 525/ GWS 595: Global Asias, is co-taught by Dr. Liang Luo and Charlie Yi Zhang. 

Lecture Abstract

What does it mean to imagine “Asia” beyond the reductive visions of contemporary policy? This
talk explores the contemporary visual culture of Chinese pasts and colonial modernities, revived
in the cinemas, new media, hospitality venues, and other material sites of Bangkok. Examining
the doubling of Hong Kong, Bangkok, and Shanghai across these sites, it investigates how a
transregional Chinese modernity that emerged under but always exceeded conditions of colonial
and national governance informs the present. As film directors such as Wong Kar-wai and hotels,
bars, and clubs revive 1930s Shanghai and 1960s Hong Kong modernities—and exploit the
Chinese past of Bangkok’s old European trading quarters—this redeployment of (semi-)colonial
histories and Chinese urban pasts is emerging as a primary signifier of the good life and
understandings of Asia in the present. The deployment of this twentieth century translocal
modernity points to enduring regional imaginaries that diverge from global notions of “China
Rising,” the People’s Republic’s own Belt and Road Initiative, or the policies of the Association
for Southeast Asian Nations. Bangkok—as a Chinese city—stands at the center of these
prominent, transregional revivals in which media and urban design projects speak of radically
different desires than those of current policy.

Please join the Committee on Social Theory for the first speaker in our Spring 2024 Speaker Series on the theme of Global Asias happening on Friday, February 16 at 2 pm ET in the UK AA Alumni Auditorium at the William T. Young Library with Dr. Matthew Kohrman! 

This series will be featuring guest speakers engaging with interdisciplinary approaches across the humanities and social sciences to address the intensified contestation about Asia in light of the shifting geopolitical dynamics in the Asia-Pacific area and globally. The framing seminar which incorporates these guest speakers, ST 690/ MCL 525/ GWS 595: Global Asias, is co-taught by Dr. Liang Luo and Charlie Yi Zhang. 

Lecture Abstract

Michel Foucault died in 1984 at age 57. Since his untimely demise, an array of scholars have developed his notions regarding the cross pollination of sovereignty and biopower, with a new wave of publications triggered by Covid-19 (Murray 2022, Rouse 2021). Amidst this vibrant theory building, large blind spots have remained, including two perennials of human experience: patriarchy and easily cultivated psychoactive drugs. In this talk, I chronicle that a specific psychoactive botanical, native to the Americas, has had an oversized role in sovereignty’s shapeshifting amidst biopower. I trace how, from the Columbian Exchange onset, tobacco came to be regularly coded a prerogative of male dominance, placing it ‘in the room’ at the birth of sovereignty-biopower synergies. And I track how such synergies, from North America to China, have regularly piggybacked on a distinctive doubling inherent to tobacco, it being something which people have long characterized as life ending and life enhancing, even medicinal. I dub this pharmakonism: processes wherein regimes, notably patriarchal, accrue power by reconciling and leveraging a commonplace thing's shifting attributes, good and bad, tonic and toxin. I develop this concept vis-a-vis tobacco with the hope it'll aid more than abstract biopolitical musing. May it also help clarify why – despite much condemnation over the last century, despite ouster from many quarters of polite society – tobacco is smoked by more people today worldwide than ever before, it remains the number cause of preventable human death, and why, if you wish, you can lawfully purchase cigarettes in nearly every country you visit. 

Held in conjunction with ST 600 "Market Failure, Famines and Crises," Dr. Alex Callinicos is the fourth speaker in the Committee on Social Theory Spring Lecture Series. The 2007-8 financial crash and the deep recession and weak recovery that followed have exposed serious flaws in our economic system. But how deep do they lie? Are the faults simply a matter of poor financial regulation or banks that are too big to fail? Karl Marx argued that ' The true barrier to capitalist production is capital itself.’ In other words, capitalism is subject to inherent limits arising from its nature as a system based on class exploitation and driven by competitive accumulation. This lecture will seek to show how a Marxist understanding of capitalism can identify the interaction between deep-seated structural tendencies towards crisis and the cycle of boom and bust in the financial markets responsible for what some commentators are beginning to call the Long Depression. At a time when a new study by French economist Thomas Piketty, Capital in the 21st Century, has identified an inherent trend towards growing economic inequality, Marx’s original Capital repays renewed study. Dr. Callinicos is a professor of European Studies at King's College London. His latest book is The Revolutionary Ideas of Karl Marx (Haymarket), 2012.

Held in conjunction with ST 600 "Market Failure, Famines and Crises," Dr. Cormac O'Grada is the third speaker in the Committee on Social Theory Spring Lecture Series. His lecture, "The Nature of Famines," will focus on the long-term demographic consequences of famines. Population pressure, public policy, and human agency all play a role in causing famine. Food markets can mitigate famine or make it worse. Dr. O'Grada is a professor of economics at at the University College Dublin School of Economics. His most recent book is Famines: A Short History Princeton University Press, 2009.

Held in conjunction with ST 600 "Market Failure, Famines and Crises," Dr. Greta Krippner is the second lecturer in the Committee on Social Theory Spring Lecture Series. Her lecture is entitled, "The Crisis in Market Regulation." She finds that state policies created the conditions conducive to financialization that solved some current policy dilemmas of the 1970s and 1980s, but created major weaknesses that would ultimately fail in the new millennium. Financialization of the economy was not a deliberate outcome sought by policymakers, but rather an inadvertent result of the state's attempts to solve other problems, especially the stagnation and deregulation in the 1970s and 1980s, the encouragement of foreign capital in the US economy, and large trade imbalances caused by direct foreign investment. Dr. Krippner is an Associate Professor in Sociology at the University of Michigan. Her latest publication is Capitalizing on Crisis: The Political Origins of the Rise of Finance Harvard University Press, 2012.

Held in conjunction with ST 600, "Market Failure, Famines and Crisis," Dr. Peter Temin is the first lecturer in the Commitee on Social Theory Spring Lecture Series. His lecture is entitled "Lessons of the Great Depression." He provides an integrated view of the Depression, covering the experience in Britain, France, Germany, and the US; hediscusses the causes, why it was so widespread and prolonged; and what brought about the world's eventual recovery. Peter Temin also finds parallels between the Great Depression and current policies that are recommended and sometimes followed by governments. Dr. Temin is a professor in the Department of Economics and History at MIT. His most recent publications include The Roman Market Economy, Princeton University Press, 2013 and The Leaderless Economy: Why the World Economic System Fell Apart and How to Fix It, Princeton University Press, 2013 (with David Vines).

Derek Gregory, University of British Columbia: “Gabriel's War: Cartography and the Changing Art of War"

January 25, 2pm

Lexmark Room, Main Building

      Dr. Derek Gregory is a member of the Department of Geography and one of two Peter Wall Distinguished Professors at the Peter Wall Institute for Advanced Studies at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada.  Dr. Gregory trained as an historical geographer at the University of Cambridge. His research focused on the historical geography of industrialization and on the relations between social theory and human geography and explored a range of critical theories that showed how place, space, and landscape have been involved in the operation and outcome of social processes. His 1982 book, Regional Transformation and Industrial Revolution, was staged on the classic ground of E.P. Thompson’s Making of the English Working Class. Following a move to Vancouver in 1989, Gregory’s work was reinforced by postcolonial critique, outlined in his 1989 book Geographical Imaginations. This new phase of work owed much to Edward Said’s critique of Orientalism, but it was much more concerned with the corporeality and physicality of travel – with embodied subjects moving through material landscapes – and with the constantly changing (often mislaid) cultural baggage of the travelers. And it paid attention what travelers mapped, sketched, and photographed – and to the consequences these representations had for their encounters.

This work on travel and travel writing was interrupted by the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on 11 September 2001, and the focus of his research shifted to the present. Drawing on his training as an historical geographer and his sense of the renewed power of Orientalism, Dr. Gregory traced the long history of British and American involvements in the “Middle East,” and showed how these affected the cultural, political, and military responses to 9/11. The Colonial Present: Afghanistan, Palestine, Iraq (2004) showed how war quite literally takes place, and described in detail the violent ‘taking of places’ not only in Afghanistan and Iraq but in occupied Palestine. The study showed how the conduct of war connects the abstractions of geopolitics – the pronouncements of politicians, the strategies of generals – to the lives and deaths of countless ordinary men and women.

His forthcoming book, The Everywhere War, shows how the conduct of war is shaped by the spaces through which it is conducted; ranging from the global war prison at Guantanamo Bay through counterinsurgency in Baghdad and the drone wars in Afghanistan/Pakistan. His new research project, Killing space, is a critical study of the techno-cultural and political dimensions of air war. It focuses on three major campaigns: the combined bombing offensive against Germany in the Second World War, America’s air wars over Indochina, and the present use of UAVs in Afghanistan/Pakistan, Somalia, Yemen, and elsewhere.  It pays particular attention to the changing ways in which cities (and eventually people) have been visualized as targets within what is now called the ‘kill-chain,’ and to the different ways in which the media have represented and reported bombing to different publics.