[Mitai-announce] October 2 5 p.m. lecture by Ananya Roy

[susan frick]

The MIT Program in Human Rights and Justice and MIT Program in 
Women's Studies present:

Ananya Roy, University of California at Berkeley

MARKETIZED, FEMINIZED, MEDIEVAL:
SPATIAL RIGHTS AND REGIMES IN AN ERA OF NEOLIBERALISM


Thursday, October 2, 2003
5-6:30 p.m.
E38-714 (7th floor conference room, Center for International Studies, 
292 Main Street)

The term neoliberalism conjures up images of IMF-imposed structural 
adjustment and brutal privatization agendas.  But alongside such 
crude forms of market fundamentalism there also exists various 
projects of compassion, from the Sustainable Human Development 
policies being advanced by a kinder and gentler World Bank and USAID 
to civil society organizations seeking to replace the privatized 
state. 

This talk examines three regimes of territorialized citizenship that 
together constitute the logic of present-day neoliberalism.  In 
marketized regimes, states behave as entrepreneurs rather than 
regulators, and even further, corporations become the state.  In 
feminized regimes, poor women are imagined and valorized as key 
agents of development and leaders of their communities.  In medieval 
regimes, the city is carved up into competing zones of sovereignty 
with civil society groups, be they homeowner associations or 
religious fundamentalist groups, establishing de facto rule. 

What do such processes mean for rights, particularly the right to the 
production of space?  What are the ways in which such forms of 
citizenship are contested and negotiated? In posing such questions, 
the talk indicates some of the continuities between neoliberalism and 
Empire.  Arguing that this contemporary moment of Empire is the 
management of universal justice - the talk and practice of just war 
in the name of universal freedoms - it highlights the necessity of 
other forms of rights-speak, critical approaches that can transcend 
the limiting duality of local relativism versus imperial universalism.

-- 
Susan Frick
Program Assistant, Program on Human Rights and Justice
Masachusetts Institute of Technology
Building E-38 Room 277
292 Main Street
Cambridge, MA 02138
Tel: 617-258-7614
Email: fricks at mit.edu
Web: http://web.mit.edu/phrj
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