Keynote 1: Jenna Loyd (Room 121)
Title: Spectacle Border Abolition
Abstract: Border walls occupy a prominent place in geographic imaginaries of where and how migration control takes place. This talk argues for the importance of understanding border walls as one spectacularly mediated site in the contemporary geography of global apartheid. Migration controls increasingly are transnationally dispersed and datafied. They show up in biometric data collection in refugee camps, drone surveillance of migratory routes, sharing of data across different jurisdictions, and more. So, while visual spectacles are important elements of state propaganda, these mediations must be situated alongside other, often non-spectacular, expressions of state-corporate violence in order to develop and sustain abolitionist migration politics.
Bio:
Jenna Loyd is an associate professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She is a feminist geographer whose work focuses on racism and state violence. One thread of her research focuses on health and the social production of health inequities. This focus can be seen in Health Rights Are Civil Rights on US-based health activism and more recent research and teaching on how health concepts and practices intersect with international migration governance. A second main thread of research focuses on theorizing the content and scope of the US carceral state, evident with Beyond Walls and Cages and Boats, Borders, and Bases. Much of her work has examined migration detention and deterrence as interrelated parts of the criminal legal system, work which has implications for movements migrant and racial justice.
Respondent: Keith Woodward
Keith Woodward is a social and cultural geographer whose graduate training includes both geography and literature. His published work addresses social and spatial theory, affect and other ‘non-representational’ forms of relationality, and interdisciplinary collaborations between geography and the humanities.
Of his work reflecting directly upon this project are publications on: localization and ‘site ontology’ (Marston et al. 2005; Jones et al. 2007); the analysis of visual media, particularly film and video (Marston et al. 2007; Lukinbeal et al. 2007); emergent geographies (Woodward forthcoming); geographies of affect (Woodward and Lea 2009); and pedagogical collaboration between geography and the humanities (Mayer and Woodward 2009).