Call for papers

MARITIME BORDERS, TECHNOLOGY, AND SECURITY

Panel (TBA)
June 29, 2020
10:00-12:00 • 2:00-4.00 

Organized by CAMILLA FOJAS and SANDRO MEZZADRA

Keynote speakers: TBA

 

This seminar explores technologies of mobility, transit, and logistics in relation to the sea as a non-territorial and fluid space. We examine the corporate-state alliance to secure the sea and control mobility of people and cargo with automated technologies and coordination among transregional policing agencies. Mapping flows and blockages, corridors and choke points, "seams" and shipwrecks the seminar will provide a maritime view on some of the major questions at stake in contemporary critical debates - from logistics to migration.

We seek transdisciplinary work that explore aspects of the intersection of the sea, technology, and migration. We welcome papers that examine techniques and technologies of controlling mobilities along a liquid frontier as well as papers that engage questions of encounter and resistance to surveillance at sea.


Camilla Fojas is Professor of American Studies and Media Studies at the University of Virginia where she also co-directs the Global South Lab with Debjani Ganguly. Her research explores cultural productions of the Americas through the axes of empire, security, and race with a specific focus on the U.S.-Mexico border. Her most recent work is on surveillance and security at the U.S.-Mexico border. Her books include Cosmopolitanism in the Americas (Purdue UP, 2005), Border Bandits: Hollywood on the Southern Frontier (University of Texas Press, 2008), Islands of Empire: Pop Culture and U.S. Power (University of Texas Press, 2014), and Zombies, Migrants, and Queers: Race and Crisis Capitalism in Pop Culture (University of Illinois Press, 2017)She co-edited Mixed Race Hollywood (NYU Press, 2008) with Mary Beltrán and Transnational Crossroads: Remapping the Americas and the Pacific(University of Nebraska Press, 2012) with Rudy Guevarra, and an anthology on race and Hawai‘i with Rudy Guevarra and Nitasha Sharma (University of Hawai‘i Press, forthcoming). Her articles have appeared in Aztlán, Cinema Journal, Symplōke, Journal of Asian American Studies, Journal of Popular Film and Television, Comparative American Studies,among other journals and edited collections . She is currently working on a new project on surveillance and security in the Americas and American Pacific tentatively titled Cultures of Surveillance: U.S. Imperial Networks across the Americas and the Pacific. Camilla Fojas has degrees in Literature and Philosophy from the University of California at Santa Cruz and an M.A. and Ph.D. from New York University in Comparative Literature. She was Vincent de Paul Professor of Latin American and Latino Studies at DePaul University before joining Media Studies and American Studies.

Sandro Mezzadra teaches political theory at the University of Bologna and is adjunct fellow at the Institute for Culture and Society of the Western Sydney University. He has been visiting professor and research fellow in several places. His recent work has centered on the relations between globalization, migration and capitalism, on contemporary capitalism as well as on postcolonial criticism. He participates in the ‘post-workerist’ debates being one of the founders of the website www.euronomade.info. Among his books: Diritto di fuga. Migrazioni, cittadinanza, globalizzazione (2006), La condizione postcoloniale. Storia e politica nel presente globale (2008) and Nei cantieri marxiani. Il soggetto e la sua produzione (2014; English edition In the Marxian Workshops, 2018). With Brett Neilson he is the author of Border as Method, or, the Multiplication of Labor (Duke University Press, 2013) and of The Politics of Operations. Excavating Contemporary Capitalism (Duke University Press, 2019).