Events

Emerging Securities Unit Seminar Series

 

Anthony Carrigan (Keele University) will be giving a presentation entitled 'Towards a Postcolonial Disaster Studies'. The presentation will take place on Wednesday 15th May at 13.00 in room CM0.12

All are welcome

Abstract:

This paper makes a case for a sustained critical exchange between two interdisciplinary fields that have significant bearings on the development of the environmental humanities: postcolonial studies and disaster studies. Since its inception in the 1950s, disaster studies has been concerned with managing crisis situations, looking to enhance resilience and assist post-disaster recovery. This has become increasingly important over the last few decades as numerous environmental disasters have highlighted how human–environmental vulnerabilities are amplified not only by anthropogenic climate change but also by the capitalist exploitation of natural resources. Both processes have accelerated in the period of expansive globalisation following World War II, resulting in natural hazards’ frequent conversion into large-scale disasters. These have disproportionate effects on the world’s poorest communities, many of which are still grappling with the legacies of western colonialism. In addition, the social crises that shadow political decolonisation – including war, genocide, and systemic poverty – have transformed natural and built environments in ways that reflect forms of ecological imperialism. All this makes disaster response and management central to postcolonial studies, with the field emerging over the last three decades, like environmental criticism, in the context of global problems such as accelerating economic disparities, resource scarcity, climate change, and U.S.-led wars. The aim of this paper is to open up some perspectives on these connections through consideration of what a postcolonial disaster studies might entail, and to suggest the importance of aesthetic and narrative analysis as part of the field’s development. Such work is especially urgent in light of appeals from within disaster studies for more detailed examinations of how narratives shape interpretations of catastrophic events, and for greater attention to categories like race, class, gender, ethnicity, disability, religion, and systemic poverty. The paper will begin by discussing points of interconnection and critique between postcolonial studies and disaster studies before turning to the work of Barbadian poet and historian, Kamau Brathwaite, in order to suggest a methodology for reading postcolonial disaster representations in particular.

 

 

 UPCOMING EVENTS

 

Scott Mason - 'Assembling Cyber-security: A framework for analysis' Wednesday 22nd May (1pm-2pm )

 

 (UN)CODED ZONING: Tuesday 7th May in room CBA0.005 at 12h00

OPEN FOR ANYONE INTERESTED IN EXPLORING THE DYNAMICS OF SPACE ...

 

(un)Coded Zoning is an open assemblage of scholars whose work engages with the dynamics of space. In particular, it is interested in the division or the construction of abstracted regions of space called zones. A zone might be a function of urban or maritime political economy; it might be an assemblage; it might be spiritual, secular or even conceptual. Moreover, a zone can be temporal – it might be encountered as an event. In whatever form it emerges, above all a zone is a site of power relations. In the zone values, people and things are perpetually coded and uncoded. By (un)coded we suggest that the zone is at once regulatory and filled with the possibility of becoming. Drawing sociology, criminology, international relations and human geography into conversation, (un)Coded Zoning is concerned with the forms of life that are emerging from a zone.

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PREVIOUS EVENTS

The Emerging Securities Unit will be hosting the 2012 Aberystwyth-Lancaster Graduate Colloquium. The colloquium provides a friendly environment for students to present their ideas and receive feedback from other students and scholars in the field, as well as to engage in some lively debates about the future of critical scholarship. The ALGC is organised by students and for students with the support of academic staff. e are inviting abstracts of individual papers as well of panels of three to four papers on any area of critical and post-structuralist approaches to global politics.

Abstracts of no more than 250 words must be sent to Corey Walker-Mortimer no later than 1 March 2012 at the following address: c.b.walker-mortimer@ilpj.keele.ac.uk.

For more information, please visit the ALGC 2012 by clicking on this link.

The Emerging Securities Unit has also been involved with an ESRC Seminar Series on Contemporary Biopolitical Security, which hosted four workshops during the period from November 2008 to February 2011. For reports on the seminar series and the workshops, please follow this link. The most recent workshop, entitled 'Problematising Danger' has a dedicated website with podcasts of the various panels that were held. To visit the website, please follow this link.

On the 7th November 2011, the Emerging Securities Unit will be co-hosting a workshop on the 'Epistemologies of the Political, the Global and the International' with the BISA Poststructuralist Politics Working Group. For more information, please refer to the workshop website, which is available through this link, or the workshop brochure, available through this link. 

Further event information is held on the Biopolitics of Security website. Please follow this link for details.