Mapping Insurgencies
25/26 April 2003
Special Collections Section of the Main Library at the University of Arizona
Free and open to the public
The Sex, Race and Globalization project seeks to address questions by joining the study of transnational economic processes with the study of sexual and racial formation. Building from a critical assessment of globalization and drawing upon the insights of queer and feminist theory, while trying to move beyond their deficits, we hope to produce politically useful, interdisciplinary analyses of culture, politics, and economics at local, regional, national and transnational scales. At a time of increasing political repression, shrinking civil liberties, and "endless war," research and activism are necessarily connected and crucially important. Mapping Insurgencies seeks to contribute toward the development of a theoretically-grounded oppositional praxis, building bridges between analysis and grassroots strategies for social change and global justice.
Mapping Insurgencies will examine how globalization is materialized and resisted in day-to-day lives by exploring key sites of surveillance, disruption and struggle. In so doing, the conference will pay attention to the forms of subjectivity through which power is enacted, in particular through sex, race and citizenship. We aim to bring together activists and scholars (and scholar-activists), students, organic intellectuals and community members to generate a dialogue about the possibilities for and presence of insurgent struggles in Tucson, as well as regionally, nationally and globally.
Participants include: Juanita Diaz, Julia Sudbury, Nayan Shah, Priscilla Settee, Shanti Parikh, Kamala Kempadoo, Anna Louise Crago, Chandan Reddy, Helen Leung, Julia Camacho, Tanya Erzen, Nadine Naber, Patricia Flores and Ruth Gilmore.
Sex, Race, and Globalization: Mapping Insurgencies
PANEL DESCRIPTIONS
Participants include: Juanita Diaz, Julia Sudbury, Nayan Shah, Priscilla Settee, Shanti Parikh, Kamala Kempadoo, Anna Louise Crago, Chandan Reddy, Helen Leung, Julia Camacho, Tanya Erzen, Nadine Naber, Patricia Flores and Ruth Gilmore.
Drugs and Terror: Challenging
the War Mentality
The war on drugs comprises surveillance, criminalization, and incarceration
that disproportionately affects Black, Latino and indigenous communities.
Internationally, the war on drugs has been used to justify increased
militarization and US aid for governments that support free trade,
neo-liberal economic/social policy, and/or oil extraction. This
panel will trace the connections between the war on drugs and the
war on terror and consider their impact on communities, especially
women and lgbt people, in the US and internationally. Panelists
will also suggest new directions in anti-war activism and coalition-building.
Sex, Bordering and Resistance
Despite the common assertion that globalization creates weak or
even open borders and thus facilitates free and utopian movement
between nation-states, the free movement of goods and capital
has in fact been coupled with ferocious restrictions on the movement
of labor. This panel will explore the regulation of morals, repression,
rape, and sexualized murder as sites of state and non-state control
of labor and population flows.
Queer Spaces and the Trans/National
Tensions of Dissidence and Belonging
This panel will explore the contradictory ways that queer identities
are taken up and disavowed in the context of globalization, examining
the relationship between US/Western imperialism and sexual dissidence,
the significance of the transformation of global capital for contemporary
queer politics, the importance of diasporic communities in the formation
of queer identities and cultures , and the possibilities for the
articulation of a resistant sexual politics within a transnational
context.
Fundamentalisms and Freedoms
The politics of fundamentalism and the meanings of freedom are broader
and more complex than the clashes of the West/East and Christianity/Islam
that have become the mainstay of media and political discourse
in North America and Europe. This panel will take up the categories
of fundamentalism and freedom with an eye toward naming these
repressed terms and thinking through the political possibilities
enabled and disabled by them.
Struggles for Indigenous Sovereignty
While the dispossession of indigenous people from ancestoral lands,
traditions and sustainable ways of life are rooted in the history
of colonization, these processes have recently been accelerated
and exacerbated by neo-liberal policies associated withglobalization.
On this panel, indigenous women will discuss the impact of globalization
and heightened border controls and suggest strategies for change
at the local and international levels.