All AI (algorithmic intelligence) companies claim they are pursuing the next logical step in digital—perhaps even human—evolution. But, the development of AI is clearly shaped by a wide range of untethered belief systems from obscure German philosophy to The Lord of the Rings. There is nothing logical about it. It is unreasonable to make AI […]

This talk examines how urban planning, animal governance, and racial politics converge in the production of interspecies belonging in Singapore. Through this, it considers what drawing, as an analytic, might offer anthropology for understanding how more-than-human worlds become governed. Focusing on the "Singapore Special" — a term for local mongrel dogs — it traces how […]

This talk offers an ethnographic account of the structures of captivity that keep migrants and deportees in conditions of enforced immobility and precarity at the Mexico-U.S. border. Whereas much scholarship has framed the border primarily as a site of transit or deadly deterrence, Martinez argues that it has been transformed into a carceral frontier that […]

This talk recalls the recent phenomena of the murder of physicians in Jordan and Yemen, and the rise in altercations in Saudi Arabia between physicians and patients and their family. Aiming to work on the physics of affinity, the binding and unbinding of ethical relationalities, within the patient-doctor relationship the physicians claim to be prophets […]

Co-sponsored by the Politics Department The last two decades have seen a flood of research on neoliberalism. Defined in multiple and even conflicting ways, the term nonetheless served as a master category of analysis for scholars from history to geography and communications. Where does the field sit now as trends of authoritarianism and reterritorialization shatter […]

How can we interpret the increasing centralisation of political authority and decision-making in the 21st century, and can movements for autonomy provide an answer to this question? The concept of territorial autonomy has been a complex issue in modern politics, especially since the emergence of postwar nation-states in the 20th century. While it provided a […]

Co-sponsored by the Center for Critical Urban and Environmental Studies Although capitalism is typically treated as a force for relentless commodification, it consistently fails to place value on vital aspects of the nonhuman world, whether carbon emissions or entire ecosystems. Free Gifts argues that to understand contemporary ecological problems from biodiversity collapse to climate change, […]