JPG1706H: Violence and Security

This seminar investigates geographies of violence, security, and resistance through an engagement with infrastructures of empire. We will consider infrastructure in its breadth and specificity, looking to both the socio-technical systems that enable uneven connection and circulation (pipelines, roads, rail, ports, damns), as well as infrastructures' social, intimate, and affective forms. In this sense, an investigation of infrastructure allows us to explore what underpins and enables the everyday material life of empire, and its alternatives. The course takes as its starting point that infrastructure has a long and violent history in sculpting space and creating dis/connection in the assembly of racial capitalism, biopolitics, settler colonialism, and imperialism. We will engage the increasingly critical and ubiquitous presence of infrastructure in the context of a securitized, financialized, and logistical geopolitical economy. Yet the course is also invested in the making of infrastructure otherwise by movements and communities that refuse or redirect the circulation of the status quo. We will examine a diverse range of struggles over infrastructure, a wide variety of means of conceptualizing infrastructure, and efforts to resist, repair, and rebuild infrastructures emerging out of especially Indigenous, queer and trans, and Black politics and movements.

0.50
St. George