Ashley J. Bohrer, Assistant Professor of Gender and Peace Studies at the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies at Notre Dame, will be speaking at the Political Science Colloquium on Monday, November 28 from 12:15-1:30. The talk is entitled “Beyond Flow: Capitalism, Confinement, and Captivity.” The abstract is below. The talk will be held in person in Oak 408 and will also be broadcast at https://uconn-cmr.webex.com/meet/mas07010. The public is invited.

Abstract: In general, when one speaks about capitalism, one speaks about mobility, exchanges, cycles, in short -- movement. In a variety of historical and contemporary accounts, movement is the central unifying thread in how we think of capitalism – whether speaking of globalized money flows, economically-motivated migration, outsourcing, international trade or digital currency, contemporary capitalism seems, above all, to be a system uniquely invested in the movement of people, goods, and money around the globe. However, confinement and captivity have been central to capital accumulation for centuries, whether we point to the enclosure of land, the confinement of the plantation, the enclosure of women into the domestic sphere, or confinement to the prison cell. Without a deep and thorough-going analysis of the centrality of these confinements to the history of capitalism, we risk under-valuing the centrality of gender, racialization, and colonization to our history and our contemporary life.

Join us for the first in a series of faculty seminars organized by the Human Rights Institute's Research Program on Arts & Human Rights.

About This Event:
This talk will draw on a companion article to Christine Sylvester's recent book Curating and Re-Curating the American War in Vietnam and Iraq (Oxford, 2019). Published in the International Relations journal Security Dialogue, “Curating and Re-Curating the American War in Vietnam” (2018) explores the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington as a "museum" site where "ordinary curators" authorize themselves to re-curate the war to put mortality --not state, honor or soldier heroism –at the heart of it. The piece mixes elements of new museum thinking with consideration of object assemblages composed and left at the Memorial, as well as the personal memories Nobel Laureate Orhan Pamuk curates into a museum to lost love in his novel The Museum of Innocence (2008). It challenges a field known for abstract theory to humanize its knowledge base by noticing ordinary civilians re-curating inherited versions of war.

About Christine Sylvester:
Christine Sylvester is sole author of 7 books on International Relations, among them Art/Museums: International Relations Where We Least Expect It (Routledge), Feminist International Relations: An Unfinished Journey (Cambridge) and Producing Women and Progress in Zimbabwe (Heinemann). She has held the Swedish Research Council’s Kerstin Hesselgren Professorship, a Leverhulme fellowship at SOAS University of London, and was an Eminent Scholar of the Feminist Theory and Gender Studies Section of the International Studies Association. She was named one of Fifty Key Thinkers in International Relations (Griffiths, Roach, Solomon), and today’s article was among 20 pieces recognized for pushing academic boundaries of security thinking over the 50-year history of Security Dialogue (M. Murphy, 2020).

Join us!
This event will take place in-person in The Dodd Center for Human Rights.

It will likewise be available online on Zoom. Please register regardless of the modality you plan to join.

Register at http://s.uconn.edu/ordinary-curators-at-the-vietnam-veterans-memorial