Date/Time
Wednesday
30 Oct 2024
3:30 pm - 5:00 pm
Location
490 Illinois St. Rm. 208
Event Type
Non-CSTMS Event
Nicholas Shapiro
Assistant Professor, University of California, Los Angeles
Drawing upon research on policing, prisons, and everyday pollution in the free world, this talk will tug on the loose ends of dominant theories of change–documentation, litigation, and legislation–in the social sciences and allied fields. The diverse array of conventional avenues for extinguishing structural harm largely buy into, fall prey to, or even simply acquiesce to what might be called the eventfulness myth. The eventfulness myth is the promissory note we write to ourselves and each other when we imagine that we can document fastidiously enough, legislate systematically enough, or narrate charismatically enough that we can extinguish a sufficient amount of the problems of late industrial racial capitalism. The specter of eventfulness defers substantive change to the catastrophes and representational technologies of a tomorrow that is perpetually out of reach. This talk ends not in a place of futility but with thinking about how social science research might contribute not only to empirically contesting forms of violence and oppression but to imaging and realizing concepts, subjectivities, and infrastructures alternative to those that drive the violences of racial capitalism. The point of adding the imaginative practices to the empirical/forensic toolbox is to kindle the friction from these multiple logics, theories, and timelines of change into the warm glow of work that recognizes mutual value and mutual necessity without indulging in the desire to resolve differences.
Event held by The Department of Humanities & Social Sciences on behalf of the Social Science Grand Rounds