redes en auje

Society for the Humanities, Cornell University Fellowships 2009-2010
http://www.arts.cornell.edu/sochum/fellowships.html

The 2009-2010 research focal theme at Cornell University's Society for the
Humanities is "Networks/Mobilities." Six to eight Fellows will be appointed.

Selected Fellows will collaborate with two Senior Scholars in Residence,
Keller Easterling (Associate Professor of Architecture, Yale University),
and Brian Massumi, Professor of Communications, University of Montreal.

The Society for the Humanities invites scholars to reflect upon the theme of
"Networks/Mobilities" in order to further understanding of historical and
contemporary flows of peoples, materials, images, and ideas across physical
and virtual boundaries. Relations of mobility and immobility, insofar as
they are being reconfigured by broad-ranging new technologies of
surveillance, detention, and legal/administrative regulation, are also
germane to the theme. The Society encourages applicants to investigate the
cultural, social, philosophical, and methodological implications of the
theme. Fellows should be working on topics related to the year's theme.

Their approach to the humanities should be broad enough to appeal to
students and scholars in several humanistic disciplines. Applicants must
have received the Ph.D. degree before January 1, 2008.

The (postmark) application deadline is October 1, 2008. For complete program
information and details on the application process, visit
http://www.arts.cornell.edu/sochum/fellowships.html, call 607-255-9274, or
send a message to humctr-mailbox@cornell.edu

____________________________________________

tesis de rafa

ayer despues de corridas en bs as y de amigos en yvr, picos de nervios que genera el primer mundo con su burocracia infalible, y que nunca había visto en el pequenyo rafa, llego el mensaje. mientras tanto la tesis esta muy buena aunque no lei la ultima version, muerte niñez y cuidados paliativos en america latina. ademas dellaburo super bueno que hace con el equipo, unas preguntas filosoficas que parten la cabeza varias veces.

Your thesis has been accepted into cIRcle. It will be available online in 3 - 4 days, and you will be sent a link to it on the UBC Library web site.

This e-mail is your official thesis receipt. A receipt will also be sent to your program, and provided you have met all other requirements, your program will be closed as of today's date.

Please remember to apply for graduation!

Congratulations! and best wishes for the future,

Caldeira, Teresa.

1. Caldeira, Teresa. 2000 City of Walls: Crime, Segregation, and Citizenship in Sao Paolo Bearkley: University of California Press. (Selections)

The circulation of discourses of fear and the proliferation of segragation are intertwined with processes of social transformation in the peripheries (as the return to democracy of Latin America and the end of the apartheid) as well as with the proliferation of violence. Neoliberalism segregation and spatial reconfiguration have generalized effects. Yet in Sao Paulo there is a particular configuration of crime, fear, violence and disrespect of citizenship, that combined with urban transformation has generated new patterns of segregation with the return to democracy. This patterns of exclusion have been generated through the proliferation of partitions, walls, distance, rules of avoidance, and movement restriction. What she calls the “talk of crime” propagates fear as much as it is a way of processing violence. Violence is related with criminal actions but cannot be separated with economic recession and neoliberal project. The discourse of crime produces social groups (and places) as dangerous and divides the social milieu. This discourse generates exclusion and generates two forms of discrimination: 1) the privatization of security, 2) the seclusion of social groups in fortified enclaves. For Caldeira the privatization of force challenges the basic definition of the state (following Weber), and of democracy, as private police does not recognize civil rights and generates a circle of violence. In this she is not discriminating between police and army, she avoids exploring police as a control of movement as much as defining criminality. The configuration of urban exclusion conform repertoires of spatial organization from which cities borrow. Democratization is then challenged in the sense of lack of defence to human rights and the lack of limit to intervene in the body of the criminal. One of them are fortified enclaves that separate groups form sites of social heterogeneity. Thus the space that emerges from the return to democracy is an undemocratic space organized by principles of inequality. This points to the entangled relation between political system and urban system, as well as how space is a dimension in which democratization is contested. She argues against post colonialism, as there is no fixed position of exteriority. To study segregation in the city there is a need to take a bigger scale perspective, take the city as a subject ad make a cross class analysis. Her work is an ethnography of violence and segregation, not of a neighbourhood. In regards to the body she argues that “the society that produces unbounded bodies is unlikely to have strong civil rights and vice versa” (374). The challenge is for her whether “can we conceive of a model that can leave a space for the promiscuity of bodies and sensuality of and yet enforce respect to privacy, individuality and human rights” But the notions of privacy, individuality and human rights remain without problematization.

Gilroy Post Colonial melancholia

Gilroy’s book is based in two central ideas: a need to put racism (as a practice producing race) in the centre of the analysis again, and a need to keep thinking the effects of coloniality in contemporary politics. He points to the need to understand the colonial and imperial past, which is otherwise partially appropriated by nostalgia, and to maintain an “un-orthodox utopia of tolerance, peace and mutual regard” (2). He proposes a series of concepts: conviviality to address the “spontaneous” actions and gestures of anti-racist cohabitation that opens a possibility of a “multiculturalism” or cosmopolitanism form below, planetary to bring back a general humanism as a measure for thinking of the effects of coloniality. The title of the book refers to a state of nostalgia that would explain some of the sentiments of racism, nationalism that originate in a non-elaborated sense of loss of the empire. This melancholy permeates the British institutions and politics and offers a sense of community not found by other means. To revisit colonialism mean to revise the concepts of universal humanism that have proven to be thin declarations in the face f the barbarities that were still committed in the colonies. There is a tension in his work between the possibilities opened by internationalist humanist that have opened the space for a conviviality now spontaneously unfolded, and a “local” need of acknowledging the nation’s colonial past in order to “set an example” of conviviality to the world. “British colonial past should be made useful in shaping the type of multicultural relation emerging in it and also outside UK to challenge notions of imperial sovereignty” (3). It is this “dark” past that puts it in a privileged position to achieve a planetary consciousness, by combining localism and universality. This consciousness has its antecedents in a cosmopolitan humanism articulated against fascism, first, and racism, latter. For Gilroy these political ideas are not just anantiracism, but also set the political bases for cosmopolitan democracy here again race is central and not just a dimension. Gilroy points to the fact that race is also the antecedent of the ideas of ethnicity, that put the biological bases of difference aside, but reproduce a notion of absolute difference, now based on culture. Race is not just a last instance of ethnicity, but “It generates a field of ethics, knowledge and power that contributes its unique order of truths to the process that produce and regulate individual subjects.” (12) Racism sets apart what is human from what is not , in a movement that puts the non human in a space outside from law and civil rights, they occupy a space of death defined by the permanent state of exception of martial law, it constitutes an imperial sovereign power. This absolute difference, reproduced by politics of multiculturalism and by analysis of identity politics, is a base of justification of dehumanizing practices as the “war on terror”, and undoes the achievements of anti racist struggles. Racism is a product of modernity and particularly was originated along with the state as a way of setting aside those with whom there is no will to generate solidarity. The subtle differences are pointed as a mark of radical distinction, a logic that starts with the state and is projected to the colonies latter. The colonies, transversed of course by the logic of racism, are thus a central part of modernity, depositary of what modern state’s do not want to face, but also “laboratories” were new forms of social control are developed and then taken to the “centre”. If ethnicity is based in racism, the notions of development are economic theory’s derivation form coloniality, changing the explanation of a “natural” difference into an explanation of stages within linear progress. Finally Gilroy analyzes those spaces where he observes a “ordinary” cosmopolitanism being developed, especially in Britain. Here, in spite of the promise of this antiracist expressions he sees the danger of state’s and market interventions, or the opposite a direction of antiracism towards them. It is not very clear then how and under which circumstances melancholic racism or cosmopolitan conviviality would emerge and under which mechanism the state and capitalism do capture this energies into its side.

Beirut - Scenic World (Live)

punteo

todo esto es lo que no quiero hacer:

- la movilidad como excepcion, pero tambien la reificacion de la movilidad como eje de lo fuido, dinamico, la "resitencia".

- la movilidad como caracteristica distintiva de la globalizacion, con un eje principal en el capital, que abre sendas que luego son usadas por otros flujos, si pero tambien ver flujos que no necesariamente siguen estos caminos, redes que se arman explicitamente en paralelo, entre localizaciones "desplazados" por el capital.

(pensar si en que y como afecta el espacio y el mov. desde una dimencion politica)

- glorificacion de lo indigena como subjetividad resistente "privilegiada", y su opuesto el negar definir lo indigena como reforzar una division que sustenta tensiones irreconciliables. lo indigena solamente como reaccion, lo indigena como continuidad inhrente.

(- si pensar als diensiones de la subjetividad que se ensamblan atraviezadas, entre otros, por aboriginalidad. y si pensar que dimensiones se combinan afectar a las subjetividad/es.)

- lo subalterno como caja negra, solamente definida en su negativa,definida en la insurgencia solamente, homogenea; lo indigena como heterogeneidad estable articulable a otras formas de diferencia en un mundo plural.

- la subjetividad como dimension del individuo

Mignolo, Darker Side

24) Mignolo, Walter. 2003. The Darker Side of the Renaissance: Literacy, Territoriality, Colonization. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press

The Darker Side of Renaissance is a book in the post colonial literature on Latin America as Mignolo makes a number of provocative arguments challenging common place assumptions about the colonization of the new world. He points to: 1) The centrality of knowledge in the production of colonial power over the new world, that the prominence of written language over native American forms of literacy was a political construction rather than an given superiority of one register over other. 2) That the registering information as act of selection but mostly of the production of an episteme of knowledge to be considered valuable was other dimension of the political domination. 3) That the colonization of space was not just a military action but also a projection of a spatial logic making space as a locus of a particular knowledge (systematized through maps). 4) That modernity, with its implications of nation state formation an capitalist accumulation, but also as the production of a negative other as a necessary part of the self, can be located as starting in the Reniassance and in the colonization of the Americas rather than in the 18th century. To do this he takes a variety of sources and methods: from literary and semiotic analysis, historiographic research, to a reflection over the production of maps. In regards o space he analyzes the “struggles between coexisting territorial representations during the economic and religious expansion of West” even when this co-existence was silenced by the Spanish. In regards to the representation of space he points that “the owner of the centre does not depend of the necessarily on geometric rationalization but, on the contrary, that geometric rationalizations are enacted around the power of the ethnic centre. (223). For him the efficacy of western cartography cannot be measured in terms of truth as a correlation between the representation and the world, but rather in its political efficiency: Europeans are in a capacity to impose their perspective as they were the powerful side of economic expansion, and also as they were able to impose the logic of representation, even when European cartographers would concede an ethnic centre of the map that is non-European one. He thus characterizes fissures between notions of time and space. A cosmological and religious concept of time separated from the one of business and administration, and a concept of space linked to the body, the community and one attached to geometric projection (226). Along all the book Mignolo points how the logic of a more evolved Europe that allowed its colonial supremacy, is a construction that needs to be criticized not just in the name of cultural relativism but to understand the way political power was created through the coloniality of knowledge that subordinated native intellectuals and their productions.

Wacquant, Loic. 2007. Urban Outcasts

23) Wacquant, Loic. 2007. Urban Outcasts: A Comparative Sociology of Advanced Marginality. Cambridge UK: Polity Press.

Wacquant makes a critic o media characterization of spaces of urban marginality as lawless and dangerous. He argues that this discourse is indeed part of what fabricates this marginalization. “Advanced marginality is a novel regime of socio-spatial relegation” (2) he argues. Instead of analyzing contemporary marginalization as a common phenomenon that can be characterized as a “ghettification” of major cities worldwide, and the emergence for an “underclass” (as the media and main stream urbanists have argued) he proposes that marginality is not the same everywhere. He wants to delineate “Social morphology, organizational makeup and functions that neighbourhoods of relegation fulfil for their respective metropolises” (4) For this he takes both the Chicago black ghetto and the Parisian banlieue. The first part of the book offers an alternative to the Chicago School analysis of poverty as a disorganizing force, to follow the connections between racial domination, class inequality, state (in)action, and spatial enclosures. He also critizises the model of the consolidation of the “dual city“ to argue that has been a process of fragmentation of the marginal and unification among dominant groups. He understand this “social fragmentation from below” as the condition of impossibility of articulationg political claims in terms of shared identity, and rather the proliferation of a variety of fragmented strategies of subsistence socialization. The second part is a comparison made on the base of structure, experience and political economy of urban marginality in the US and France. He combines quantitative and ethnographic analysis in order to historize how both formations have changed over time as result of external causes and what are the implications of this for people living in places of exclusion. He relates the creation of the North American hyper-ghetto with: 1) the deepening inequalities generated by capital concentration, and 2) the withdrawal of state policies of welfare, generating the decay of institutions of the ghetto and a state of social abandonment,3) the strengthening of policies of racial segregation among which there is a growing , 4) of policing and criminalization of the ghettos. The European balineues contrarily rather than being space of racial segregation are constituted from the chronic unemployment and employment precarization, in the ethnically heterogeneous former working-class neighbourhoods. He analyzes how in both cases there is territorial stigmatization that enhances process of de-solidarization, operating in different dimensions in each case: exclusion in France is based in terms of class while in the US is based in racial terms. The general critique we can make is that he follows a too schematic logic of cause- effect and flattens the complexities of He is very about state role in the configuration of space (he does not quote Lefebvre nor acknowledges most of of the theoretical debates over social dimension of space except for some of Bourdieu’s considerations taken form a systemicist perspective) “effects of space turn out to be effects of state projected on to the city”. (6) He emphasises that violence is more a consequence of all these historical processes rather than any sudden “explosion” of ethnic rage, and that ultimately erodes any possibility of citizenship as a category that would even up capitalism’s inequalities.

Jeremy Bigwood

The web page of a photo journalist and researcher with amazing takes on Salvador and others.
This are photos of the FMLN Offensive: Zacamil, San Salvador