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HomeUpcoming Events and SeminarsResearching Transgression In An Age of Dread
Researching Transgression in an Age of Dread

Dr Bradley L. Garrett

(University of Southampton)

Neoliberal cities around the world are comprised of three consistent tropes: privatised “public” space and security, persistent surveillance systems and spatial inequality. As privacy is subsumed by omnipresence and daily life becomes toxified by dread perpetuated by connectivity, populist cynicism crescendos. Yet as Guattari wrote in his 1996 essay Towards a Post-Media Era, ‘new technologies foster efficiency and madness in the same flow... It can blow up like a windshield under the impact of molecular alternative practices.’ Perhaps there is hope yet for heterogeneity. Yet the logic of capitalism, based more on appropriation than suppression, often means that the emancipatory potency of successful alternative practices are sapped where their aesthetics become yoked, or that these practices lay low with awareness of that danger, remaining localised and disjointed, if effective. With this in mind, as researchers who collect information, (co)produce knowledge and raise awareness, we are capable of inflicting great harm on those we work with and on their alternative practices. In an age of dread, how are we to research transgressions against the neoliberal city without reifying, essentialising and therefore undermining the very practices we find promising?

Date & time

  • Mon 19 Sep 2016, 1:00 pm - 2:00 pm

Event Series

Sociology Seminar series