Inverting Globalisation

Organised by the Amsterdam Centre for Globalisation Studies (ACGS)
http://www.acgs.uva.nl>

Whereas David Harvey has famously interpreted globalisation as a process of
time/space compression, multiple trends proliferating globally suggest that
its functional effects include the rooted, the local and the slow. The
Amsterdam Centre for Globalisation Studies (ACGS) has developed four
research clusters around the themes of mobility, sustainability, aesthetics
and connectivity. This conference probes the flip side of these themes,
engaging with those aspects of globalisation that too often remain in the
shadows or are seen as antithetical to it. We want to analyse the tensions
and interactions between mobility and immobility, between sustainability and
precarity, between glossy and dirty aesthetics, and between connection and
disconnection – not to arrive at yet another set of binaries, but to show
how these inverse processes are also intrinsic to globalisation. Taking them
into account will make possible a fuller understanding of the uneven, often
unexpected and not always obvious ways in which globalisation impacts the
contemporary world.


Keynote speakers:

·      Fatma Müge Göcek (Professor of Sociology and Women's Studies,
University of Michigan, US)

·      Oliver Marchart (Professor of Sociology, Düsseldorf Art Academy,
Germany)

·      Ellen Rutten (Professor of Slavonic Literature and Culture,
University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands)

·      Ulises Mejias (Associate Professor of Communication Studies, State
University of New York College at Oswego, US)


The conference will comprise four sessions:

Session I: Immobility and the Rearticulation of Identities

Besides globalisation’s well-covered tendency towards a general condition of
mobility, pervasive instances of immobility can be found. Factory workers
whose cheap labour is indispensable for global trade, but who remain
confined to their immediate surroundings constitute one tangible example. In
addition, there are more intangible instances of immobility, such as the
worldwide (re-)assertion of national and religious identities claimed to be
timeless and sacrosanct. Are these rearticulated and reasserted identities
merely instances of false consciousness? Is there a relation between ever
more fluid processes of cultural production and exchange, and the attempts
to block this mobility in the name of invented or imagined culture or
tradition? Or are newly aggressive forms of identity politics part and
parcel of contemporary globalised governmentality?


Session II: Unsustainability, Precarity, Ecology

The inverse of the sustainable is the unsustainable, evoking a sense of the
unbearable or intolerable, a moment of crisis. Unsustainability can be
attributed to global economic growth, energy needs, food provision, or to
particular political structures or ways of life. It can be used in service
of many goals, from the revolutionary to the conservative. This session asks
how unsustainability can be understood (epistemologically, politically,
affectively) and explores its relation to precarity, another term that
inverts the emphasis on survival implicit in sustainability, and to ecology,
which no longer applies exclusively to environmental matters but is
increasingly linked to the (geo)political.


Session III: Dirty Aesthetics

Processes of globalisation inspire a dialogue but also tensions between
different conceptualisations of the aesthetic. One such tension emerges in
the quest for the authentic and/or local through the rough and the dirty.
Folk singers aspire to authenticity by refusing technologies of
amplification, fashion designers use untreated materials, and urban fringes
are turned into creative districts. These proliferating “dirty aesthetics”
validate local modes of production that are frequently coupled to artisanal
craftsmanship. Can an aesthetics of roughness and imperfection claim to be
resistant to the glossy surfaces of globalisation? Or will the margins be
consumed as yet another resource for the integrating genius of a capitalist
world market?


Session IV: Dis- and Misconnection

This session critically examines the claim of unlimited many-to-many
communication through social media platforms by exploring the role of dis-
and misconnection. It focuses on three sets of actors that facilitate and
broker, but also obstruct and complicate, online connectivity. First, users
of the Web divide into linguistic spheres and particular networks. Second,
corporations zealously protect online platforms by walling off users and
their data, blackboxing their technological architectures, and
algorithmically steering and organising user interaction. Finally, states
become increasingly sophisticated in controlling and “nationalising” online
communication through surveillance and filtering, as well as through
propaganda and cyber-attacks.

Organising Committee:

Robin Celikates

Johan F. Hartle

Jeroen de Kloet

Michiel Leezenberg

Esther Peeren

Thomas Poell

Marijke de Valck

See also the conference webpage: