CFP: Conference on Insecurity, UW-Milwaukee

The Center for 21st Century Studies at the University of
Wisconsin-Milwaukee invites proposals for their spring 2019 conference,
Insecurity, which will take place on May 2-4, 2019.


Confirmed plenary speakers for the conference are: *Neel Ahuja *(UC Santa
Cruz), *Jennifer Doyle *(UC Riverside), *Annie McClanahan *(UC Irvine), *Mark
Neocleous *(Brunel University London), *Safiya Noble *(USC), *Naomi
Paik *(Illinois),
and *Saskia Sassen *(Columbia).


*Full description: *

This conference proposes the concept of “insecurity” as one of the
governing logics of economic, political, and social life in the West at the
end of the second decade of the 21st century. Insecurity picks up on, and
challenges, several key concepts of 21st century studies, especially
“precarity,” “securitization,” and “resilience.”


The notion of insecurity has affinities with, but is more capacious than,
“precarity,” which has been used by cultural, economic, and sociopolitical
theorists to describe the structural vulnerability that runs through the
complex historical formation of labor under which we operate today. Like
precarity, insecurity manifests itself in terms of diminished access to
housing, food, healthcare, and other vital human and social welfare
resources. Both precarity and insecurity address the increasing economic
inequality of the 21st century, in which the gap between individual and
corporate wealth and the income of those who work (or are unable to work)
for a living grows increasingly vast and unbridgeable. Our definition of
insecurity begins with and is predicated upon the structural economic
injustice and precarity that predominate in our present historical moment,
but expands the concept of precarity from its primarily economic meaning to
include technological, affective, environmental, and geopolitical concerns.


Insecurity also picks up on and challenges the basic premises of
“securitization,” which refers to the burgeoning structure of state and
non-state surveillance that has proliferated in the US and globally after
9/11. In fact, it would not be mistaken to insist that rather than making
populations, transportation, and information systems more secure,
securitization systematically *produces insecurity*—evident most
dramatically in the treatment of refugees, migrants, and asylum-seekers
across the globe, but also in the increased danger of cybercrimes or cyber
war, terrorism, climate disasters, global epidemics, and economic
crashes. Political theorists and legal scholars have identified the
“insecurity state,” which gets at some of what we mean to address. But we
mean as well to take up the way in which surveillance and securitization
generate both individual and collective feelings of insecurity. These are
experienced in a highly securitized daily life, in which the ubiquity of
social media, data mining, GPS tracking, and other surveillance
technologies enables the collection of unfathomable quantities of data in
the name of securing the state from named and unnamed threats which are
themselves produced by the apparatus of securitization.


We seek proposals for 15-20 minute papers, which could address any of the
following topics:

   - securitization, cybersecurity, hacking, surveillance
   - data insecurity
   - refugees, migrants, and border security
   - precarious labor
   - gender/sexual insecurity, the erosion of trans rights and the
   increasing visibility of sexual assault
   - climate, water, and ecological insecurity
   - food insecurity
   - housing insecurity
   - resilience and insecurity
   - psychological insecurity
   - national, geopolitical, and technological insecurity
   - health care security, global biorisk
   - the security state
   - economic insecurity, global financial markets, and the threat of
   collapse


Please send your abstract (up to 250 words) and a brief (1-page) CV by *Friday,
January 11, 2019* to Richard Grusin, Director, Center for 21st Century
Studies, at [email protected].



-- 
Maureen E Ryan, PhD
Deputy Director, Center for 21st Century Studies
The University of Wisconsin - Milwaukee
[email protected] | uwm.edu/c21

Now out from Routledge:
*Lifestyle Media and Gender in American Culture: Gender, Class, and the
Politics of Ordinariness
<https://www.routledge.com/Lifestyle-Media-in-American-Culture-Gender-Class-and-the-Politics-of/Ryan/p/book/9781138206465>*
&
*Emergent Feminisms: Complicating a Postfeminist Media Culture*
<https://www.routledge.com/Emergent-Feminisms-Complicating-a-Postfeminist-Media-Culture/Keller-Ryan/p/book/9780815386612>

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