Darren Byler, In/Convenience, and more..
Register for our winter events and working groups!
Capitalist Frontier-Making in Northwest China: Technologies of Muslim Enclosure, Dispossession and Subtraction
A Public Lecture with Darren Byler (Simon Fraser University)
February 22, 2 PM EST//Virtual Event (Register here)
Event Description: In his book Terror Capitalism anthropologist Darren Byler shows that the mass detention of over one million Muslims in “reeducation camps” is part of processes of resource extraction in Uyghur and Kazakh lands that have led to what he calls terror capitalism—a configuration of ethnoracialization, surveillance, and internment that in this case promotes settler colonialism. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in the regional capital Ürümchi, this talk will show how media infrastructures built in part in Seattle, Beijing and Xinjiang combined with state-corporate enforcement of a capacious technological counterterrorism to produce new forms of Muslim enclosure, dispossession and, ultimately, a subtraction of their life itself. He particularly attends to the experiences of young men, who are made the primary target of state violence—and how they cope with novel forms of unfreedom. By tracing the political and economic stakes of this emergent internal colonial project, the talk demonstrates that state-directed capitalist dispossession is coconstructed with relations of domination that are truly global.
Find out more on our website.
In/Convenience Working Group
We are still accepting participants for the lab’s 2021-22 Seminar in Media and Political Theory, organized around the problem of in/convenience.
The seminar draws on a collaborative research project led by Joshua Neves and Marc Steinberg examining the culture and politics of in/convenience, and will include three reading group meetings and culminate in a hybrid conference on April 21-22, 2022 (featuring: Neta Alexander, Armin Beverungen, Orit Halpern, Mél Hogan, Melissa Gregg, and Tung-hui Hu). Read more about the seminar here.
The next meeting takes place on February 24th at 4 PM. We will be reading and discussing Seb Franklin’s The Digitally Disposed: Racial Capitalism and the Informatics of Value.
To register please email: gem.lab.info@gmail.com (use subject “convenience”). We ask participants to commit to attending each of the sessions and to carefully reading the suggested material.
Cinemas of Global Solidarity
The University of Calgary’s Department of Communication, Media and Film is holding a virtual symposium, Cinemas of Global Solidarity, on March 3-4. GEM members Masha Salazkina and Luca Caminati, as well as several other friends of the lab, are presenters at the symposium, which “will explore the entwined legacies of anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist internationalism in the cinema with a view toward contemporary forms of politicized moving image culture.” Read more about the event here. Register here.
We’re reading & listening to…
Darren Byler talks to CBC Radio’s Ideas about Terror Capitalism.
Emily West’s Buy Now: How Amazon Branded Convenience and Normalized Monopoly (2022), from MIT Press’ new “Distribution Matters” series.