LOWER EDUCATION AT CUNY…….”TOWARDS A COUNTERTOPOGRAPHY OF RISK AND WASTE”: HUH?
Accumulation, Excess, and Childhood: Towards a Countertopography of Risk and Waste
The CUNY Graduate Center
Postcolonial Studies Group Colloquium Series 2010-2011
Cindi Katz
The City University of New York, Graduate Center
Accumulation, Excess, and Childhood: Towards a Countertopography of Risk and Waste
Neoliberal capitalism is in the throes of crisis–crises actually–associated with over-accumulation and several decades of privatization, commodification, and financialization, each sieved through the other. These crises have profound consequences for the present and future that can be seen in the shifting discourses and material social practices concerning children and childhood. In this paper I reframe David Harvey’s analysis of the accumulation crisis around questions of social reproduction, and look at its relationship to contemporary childhood and selected configurations of the child. I will pay particular attention to configurations of the child as waste, not only as the constitutive outside to those of the child as accumulation strategy, commodity, and ornament, but also as a means of managing the current political economic crisis discursively and materially. I will point to some of the key strategies of ‘waste management,’ such as prisons and the juvenile justice system, the military, and panics around youth and childhood focused variously on education, drugs, sex, and violence, teasing out some of their sociospatial implications. Connecting global north and south my project traces a countertopography of childhood risk and waste from which current crises of accumulation might be reimagined and redressed.
October 1st at 2 p.m.
CUNY Graduate Center, Room 5409
All are welcome.
This event is co-sponsored by the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences, the Environmental Psychology Program, the Center for Place, Culture and Politics and the Spacetime Research Collective.
Cindi Katz is Professor of Geography in Environmental Psychology and Women’s Studies at the CUNY Graduate Center. She has published on social reproduction, the production of space, place and nature, children and the environment and the consequences of global economic restructuring for everyday life, in edited collections and in journals such as Society and Space, Social Text, Signs and Feminist Studies. She is the editor (with Janice Monk) of Full Circles: Geographies of Gender over the Life Course (Routledge 1993) and of Life’s Work: Geographies of Social Reproduction (with Sallie Marston and Katharyne Mitchell) (Blackwell 2004). She is the author of Growing up Global: Economic Restructuring and Children’s Everyday Lives (U of Minnesota P, 2004).
The CUNY Graduate Center is located at 365 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10016.
The Postcolonial Studies Group is a chartered organization of the Doctoral Students’ Council. Please visit our website at www.opencuny.org/psg
Questions? Email Fiona Lee at fiona.lee@gmail.com
Comments are closed.
