Neoliberal Visions: Culture, Gender and Subjectivity, South-South Dialogues
The Middle East Centre, London School of Economics (LSE)
and
Institute of Women’s Studies
(in conjunction with Muwatin Institute for Democracy and Human Rights)
Birzeit University
Present
The November-December 2021 Webinar Series
Neoliberal Visions: Culture, Gender and Subjectivity, South-South Dialogues
Tuesday November 23rd (19:00 Pal/17:00 UK)
Wednesday December 8th (17:00 Pal/15:00 UK)
This interdisciplinary seminar series is part of the LSE-Birzeit collaborative project “Neoliberal Visions”. Bringing scholars together from anthropology, gender studies, media and communications, Middle East studies, and human geography, it explores the cultural, gendered, and psychic lives of neoliberalism beyond the global north. Focused instead on south-south dialogues, panellists theorise neoliberal dynamics through empirical case studies from Palestine, Lebanon, Barbados, Nigeria, India, and Colombia. Moving beyond political economic approaches to neoliberal transformations, the seminar series underscores how neoliberal shifts are reshaping gendered, social, and cultural subjectivities across a range of different - yet interconnected - transnational contexts.
To register, please click this link
*The presentations will be in English with simultaneous Arabic translation
Speakers
Tuesday November 23rd Webinar
(19:00 Pal/17:00 UK)
The Gendered Social Lives of Neoliberalism
Speakers
Dr. Christopher Harker, University College London
Christopher Harker is Associate Professor of Geography at University College London where he directs the Research and PhD Programs at the Institute of Global Prosperity. His ethnographically informed work in human geography on aspects of space and social life in Palestine have appeared in Geoforum, Antipode, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, and the International Journal of Urban and Regional Research. In his recent book, Spacing Debt: Obligations, Violence and Endurance in Ramallah, Palestine (Duke University Press, 2020) he analyses the roles played by neoliberal financialization in the form of household bank debt amidst a broader range of socio-cultural and economic practices to create new modes of living in Palestine in the face of ongoing colonial occupation. His current research focuses on elite led “financial inclusion”, processes through which poorer people become enfolded into financial technologies, practices and markets.
Prof. Carla Freeman, Emory College
Carla Freeman is the Goodrich C. White Professor of Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and is the Executive Associate Dean of Emory College of Arts and Sciences. A cultural anthropologist and feminist scholar of gender, labour, and globalization, her work examines the changing forms and meanings of work/life in the 20th and 21st centuries, and the growing role of affect and affective labour across market and non-market economies. Her theorization of gender, class, subjectivity, and neoliberalism is grounded in ethnographic fieldwork over thirty years in the Caribbean. She has published three books: High Tech and High Heels in the Global Economy (Duke University Press, 2000), Entrepreneurial Selves (Duke University Press, 2014) and Global Middle Classes (with Rachel Heiman and Mark Liechty, SAR Press) and numerous journal articles in: American Ethnologist, Cultural Anthropology, Feminist Anthropology, Signs, and Critique of Anthropology. She is the editor (with Li Zhang, UC-Davis) of Oxford University Press’ series of contemporary ethnography, "Issues of Globalization" and is the past President of the Association for Feminist Anthropology. Freeman is currently a Visiting Researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development, Centre for the History of Emotions, and is working on a book on the expansion of emotional labour under late capitalism.
Dr. Simidele Dosekun, London School of Economics (LSE)
Dr Simidele Dosekun is Assistant Professor in the Department of Media and Communications at LSE. Her research centres African women in order to explore questions of gender, race, subjectivity, and power in a global context. Her recent book, Fashioning Postfeminism: Spectacular Femininity and Transnational Culture (Illinois University Press 2020) traces ideas and practices about postfeminist self-fashioning and subjectivity among young urban women in Lagos, Nigeria, in order to show how postfeminist styles and subjectivities are not fixed, but are transformed as they travel across culture, geography, race and class. She is also the author and co-editor of African Luxury: Aesthetics and Politics (Intellect Books 2019). Her work has appeared in the journals Feminist Media Studies, Feminism and Psychology, Qualitative Inquiry, and Feminist Africa, among others. She is a member of the editorial collectives for the journals Feminist Africa and Feminist Theory.
Chairs: Dr. Polly Withers LSE, Dr. Rema Hammami BZU
Wednesday December 8th Webinar
(17:00 Pal/15:00 UK)
Gender and the Cultural Lives of Neoliberalism
Speakers
Prof. Jyotsna Kapur, Southern Illinois University
Jyotsna Kapur is a Professor of Cinema and Media Studies and the Director of the University Honors Program. Her research and teaching interests include: Marxist-feminist theory; The politics of labor, class, race, and sexuality in neoliberalism; and contemporary Indian media culture. She is the author of two books; The Politics of Time and Youth in Brand India: Bargaining with Capital (Anthem Press 2013) and Coining for Capital: Movies, Marketing, and the Transformation of Childhood (Rutgers University Press 2005); both works interrogate how the neoliberal turn worldwide since the 70s radically transformed the relationship between generations and our consciousness of time.
Dr Hanan Toukan, Bard College
Hanan Toukan is Associate Professor of Politics and Middle East Studies at Bard College Berlin. Her writings have appeared in Cultural Politics, Arab Studies Journal, International Journal of Cultural Studies, Radical Philosophy, Journal of Visual Culture, Journal for Palestine Studies, Review of Middle East Studies, Jerusalem Quarterly, SCTIW Review, Jadaliyya and Ibraaz amongst others. She is Contributing Editor at the Jerusalem Quarterly and a member of the Editorial Collective of the Journal of Visual Culture. She is currently a EUME fellow of the Alexander Von Humbodlt in Berlin.
Dr. Tania Pérez-Bustos, National University of Colombia
Tania Pérez-Bustos is a feminist scholar working on technologies and knowledge dialogues. Her current research interests focus on handmade textiles as technologies of knowledge and care. She is the founder of Artesanal Tecnológica and is a faculty member at the School of Gender Studies at the National University of Colombia. She is interested in transdisciplinary work to explore methodologies that enable transformative research and pedagogies.
Chairs: Dr Polly Withers LSE, Dr Rania Jawad BZU
