Cindi Katz

Historical Geographies of the Neoliberal Present 1973-2008

Neoliberalism as discourse and practice has infused, propelled, and been lubricated by global economic restructuring. Like ‘globalization,’ the term ‘neoliberalism’ has become--to use John Clarke’s words—promiscuous, omnipresent, and omnipotent. In this seminar we will emphasize the flexible, contingent, and conjunctural aspects of neoliberalism, as we look at how it takes shape and is contested in particular historical geographies. Examining the constructions of space and time and the sedimentations of socio-spatial relations associated with various narratives of neoliberalism since its ascent in the early 1970s, our workshop will address neoliberalism as a political-economic project, as a political rationality and as a technology of power, and think about the bodies, places, institutions, and material social practices with which these are constituted.

Workshop topics will include the sprawling and discontinuous geographies of social reproduction, the twisted spatialities of neoliberal militarism, the uneven geographies of accumulation and dispossession, the commodification of knowledge, governmentality and the making of consumer-citizens, and resistance to the political economic regimes and practices associated with neoliberalism. In the long tradition of working against American exceptionalism the workshop will keep in sight the imperialist underbelly of the twinned discourses of neoliberalism and globalization in the US.

Suggested Readings

Barry, Andrew, Thomas Osborne, & Nikolas Rose (eds) (1996) Foucault and Political Reason, University of Chicago Press. Chapters 1, 2, 6, 8.

Brenner, Neil and Theodore, Nik (2002) Cities and the Geographies of “Actually Existing Neoliberalism”, Antipode 34: 351-79.

Brown, Wendy (2005) Edgework: Critical Essays on Knowledge and Politics, Princeton University Press. Chapter 3.

Clarke, John (2008) Living with/in and without Neo-liberalism, Antipode 40 (4). (not out yet, copies will be made available).

Coombe, Rosemary J. (2003) Works in Progress: Traditional Knowledge, Biological Diversity, and Intellectual Property in a Neoliberal Era, in Globalization Under Construction: Governmentality, Law, and Identity, edited by Richard Warren Perry and Bill Maurer. University of Minnesota Press, pp. 273-313.

Harvey, David (2005) A Brief History of Neoliberalism, Oxford University Press.

Holland, Dorothy C., et al. (2007) Local Democracy Under Siege; Activism, Public Interests and Private Politics, New York University Press. Chapters 1, 2 & Part II.

Katz, Cindi (2001) Vagabond Capitalism and the Necessity of Social Reproduction, Antipode 33: 708-27.

Larner, Wendy (2000) Neo-liberalism: Policy, Ideology, Governmentality, Studies in Political Economy 63: 5-25.

Leitner, Helga; Jamie Peck; & Eric S. Sheppard (2006) Contesting Neoliberalism: Urban Frontiers, Guilford Press. Chapters 1,2, 6, 15.

Mitchell, Katharyne (2003) Educating the National Citizen in Neoliberal Times: From the Multicultural Self to the Strategic Cosmopolitan, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 28(4): 387-403.

Ong, Aihwa (2006) Neoliberalism as Exception: Mutations in Citizenship and Sovereignty, Duke University Press. Part III.

Peck, Jamie and Tickell, Adam (2002) Neoliberalizing Space, Antipode 34(3): 380-404.

RETORT (2005) Afflicted Powers: Capital and Spectacle in a New Age of War, Verso. Chapter 2.

Richardson, Diane (2005) Desiring Sameness: The Rise of a Neoliberal Politics of Normalisation, in Working the Spaces of Neoliberalism edited by Nina Laurie and Liz Bondi. Blackwell, pp. 122-42.

See also:

Derksen, Jeff (2006) Poetry and the Long Neoliberal Moment. West Coast Line 51 40(3).

Miller, Peter and Rose, Nikolas (2008) Governing the Present: Administering Economic, Social and Personal Life, Polity. (not out yet)