Development Seminar

Constituting global subjects and the politics of risk management:

An interdisciplinary roundtable

with guests Matthew Sparke and Katharyne Mitchell (U of Washington) and U of T faculty Michelle Murphy (history), Katharine Rankin (geography), and Tania Li (anthropology)

Thursday 7 November 12.30 -2.30pm, Room SS5017B

Vegetarian lunch will be served at 12.10 - please join us.

How are individuals and populations constituted as subjects who take responsibility for their own destinies? Why do they consent to a politics that highlights choice, maximization, and the management of risk?  What is the form taken by resistance to these tendencies, and what are its limits? Matthew Sparke will discuss how biological risk management for some is predicated on the exacerbation of risk for others, paying particular attention to flows of data, tissue, and health workers from the global south to the north. Katharyne Mitchell will discuss educational risk, and the pairing of expanded choice for parents with mechanisms to make them responsible for wrong choices.  The roundtable will explore both concepts and methodologies, specifically: how can we examine both risk and subject-making empirically, and track their effects?

Everyone Welcome
 

Matthew Sparke is Professor of Geography, International Studies and Global Health at the University of Washington, where he also serves as the Director of Integrated Social Sciences. He is the author of Introducing Globalization: Ties, Tensions and Uneven Integration (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013), as well as In the Space of Theory: Post-foundational Geographies of the Nation-State (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press) and over 75 other publications. Based on grants from the National Science Foundation, the Mellon Foundation, and the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, his research is focused on the uneven geographies of globalization, including most recently epidemiologies of inequality and enclaved risk management in global health and biological citizenship.

Katharyne Mitchell is a Professor in the Department of Geography at the University of Washington, Seattle. She has authored or edited five books, including Crossing the Neoliberal Line: Pacific Rim Migration and the Metropolis, and Practising Public Scholarship: Experiences and Possibilities Beyond the Academy. Mitchell served as Simpson Professor of the Public Humanities at the University of Washington from 2004-2007, focusing on childhood and education in the United States. She is the recipient of fellowships from the National University of Singapore, and Stanford University, and grants from the Spencer Foundation, MacArthur Foundation and the National Science Foundation.

Sponsored by: Department of Geography and the Development Seminar http://www.devsem.utoronto.ca/