SANDRO MEZZADRA
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The course will address the main topics of the 2017 Summer School from the angle of a critical consideration of contemporary capitalism. Scholarly debates surrounding the specificity of current formations of capitalism will be synthetically reviewed at the beginning of the course, which will then take recent developments in such important “sectors” as logistics, finance, and extraction as points of entry into a more general analysis of global capitalism. The point will be made that “extractive” dimensions and operations play increasingly important roles in the workings of capitalism. Against the background of this research hypothesis both contemporary transitions of sovereignty and the perspectives for social movements will be critically discussed. Sandro Mezzadra works as an Associate Professor of Political Theory at the University of Bologna, where he teaches postcolonial studies and contemporary political theory. He has published widely on the areas of migration, postcolonial theory, contemporary capitalism, Italian operaismo and autonomist Marxism. He recently completed a book with Brett Neilson, Border as method, or, the multiplication of labor (2013, Duke University Press). His writings have been translated into ten languages: Italian, French, German, Spanish, Finnish, Greek, Slovenian, Portuguese, Chinese and Japanese. He is currently "visiting research fellow" at the Berliner Institut für empirische Integrations- und Migrationsforschung (BIM), Humboldt Universität zu Berlin and a partner researcher on two ARC Discovery projects based at Western Sydney University ("Logistics as Global Governance: Labour, Software and Infrastructure along the New Silk Road" and "Data Centres and the Governance of Labour and Territory"). |