Forensic Infrastructure: Building the Global South
Thursday, 2 April, 2015 - 11:30
WiSER is hosting a series of public events on the theme of Forensic Infrastructures on Tuesday 31 March and Wednesday April 1. Together with the Planned Violence Network, (Oxford and London) and UC Irvine, we have invited speakers including Eyal Weisman (by video link up) Gregoire Chamayou, Pablo Mukherjee, Michael Keith, Elleke Boehmer, David Goldberg, Acbkar Abbas to engage with a range of South African scholars and writers, including Mark Gevisser, Imraan Coovadia and Zen Marie.
The events converge around the following questions:
What are the conceptual and historical underpinnings and technologies of the infrastructures of political violence? How do mappings of infrastructures in different forms – military technologies, policing, biometrics, forensics, cities and texts – produce emergent networks of communication, economic exchange and informal or urban circuitries, both actual and imaginary? How can ideas of forensic infrastructures help us to analyse and understand the recent Paris attacks – and the activities of Boko Haram in Northern Nigeria? What would a forensic analysis of cities like Johannesburg look like – drawing on Eyal Weisman’s methodology of ‘forensic architecture.
An online exhibition accompanies this conference.
Tuesday, 31st March
9h15 - 12h30
Planned Violence: Infrastructures, Technologies, Politics
Elleke Boehmer, Gregoire Chamayou, Pablo Mukherjee, Dominic Davies, Sarah Nuttall, David Goldberg
Respondents: Achille Mbembe, Michael Keith
Wednesday, 1st April
11h00 – 12h30
Writers’ Readings and Performance
Mark Gevisser, Lost and Found in Johannesburg, Imraan Coovadia, Tales of the Metric System and Zen Marie, ‘I Am Not Jozie’
Respondents: Ackbar Abbas, Charne Lavery, Pamila Gupta
Respondents: Ackbar Abbas, Charne Lavery, Pamila Gupta
16h15-17h30
Position pieces: City Infrastructures
Pablo Mukherjee, ‘Indian Ocean crime fiction’, Ruvani Ranasinha, ‘Migrant lives’, Lakshmi Menon, ‘University Infrastructures’ and Claudia Gastrow, ‘Tools of segregation in Luanda’
-All Welcome-
WISER Research Theme: