Pre-Submission Seminar

Speaker: Kaima Negishi
Location: Larry Saha Room (HA2175)

In this seminar, I would like to present an overview of my PhD thesis. The primary aim of this thesis is to suggest that ‘soft’ forms of control exercised in urban railway spaces play a pivotal role in the making of a ‘post-political’ subject in contemporary Japanese society. As Chantal Mouffe and many other critical theorists have argued, we are now witnessing a large scale unfolding of the ‘post-political’ world where political antagonism and disagreement have been erased to prioritise consensus-making and deliberation. While these scholars have theorised the ‘post-political’ through the ‘high’ level politics of institution, policy and regulation, very little has been written about the significance of the ‘low’ level politics of everyday life. This thesis endeavours to fill in the gap and unpack the creation of a ‘post-political’ subject by exploring ‘soft’ governmental techniques implemented in urban railway spaces. These spaces are where individuals pass through and spend a large portion of time waiting for trains to arrive and carry them to a destination or transferring between different lines on a daily basis. Despite their seeming banality, this thesis reveals that these spaces serve as a key manufacturing site of the ‘post-political’ world.