This Year’s Theme: Bodily Sovereignty and Collective Action
Why This Theme, Now?
Within the U.S. and beyond, the past few years have been a turbulent and reactionary period of social and political realignment. In the U.S., state level abortion bans have dangerously regressed national laws on reproductive autonomy, while public protests and social media activism are insisting that #TimesUp on the corporate and cultural protection of patriarchal sexual violence. National borders are being remapped and rezoned around the world, as in the U.S. policy that extends a militarized national border all the way to the southern border of Mexico, or the ongoing refugee and border crises in Western Europe ignited by Brexit, all of which operate within a nationalist paradigm rooted in authoritarianism, isolationism and xenophobia. As Wendy Brown puts it in Walled States, Waning Sovereignty, these developments exhibit “subject desires that are themselves the effect of declining sovereignty, desires that states can neither gratify nor ignore.” In this view, movements for autarky, for America First, for Walls and bans arise precisely because the “potent fiction” of nation-state sovereignty has been “compromised by growing transnational flows of capital, people, ideas, goods, violence, and political and religious fealty.” Their aim is to reactivate nation-state sovereignty through a violent assault on the absolute sovereignty of migrants, refugees, the marginalized, and stateless persons. Popular understandings of these developments is increasingly defined by micro-targeted advertisements, feeds, and search results made possible by the corporate and government harvesting of personal data, channelled through proprietary algorithms that excel at creating isolated islands of ideological sovereignty at the expense of actual information autonomy and democratic connectivity. And amidst all of this, environmental protections are rolled back, whether in the Amazonian Rainforest or in Indigenous lands across North America, continuing a centuries-long colonial assault on Indigenous/ Native sovereignty.
(Text sourced from conference website)