4/12 Heilbroner Center Student Conference

Entanglements in Late Capitalism: Instruments and Precarity

The Heilbroner Center Graduate Fellows are hosting their annual student conference, this year on Entanglements in Late Capitalism: Instruments and Precarity.

Keynote Jackie Wang will present on Carceral Capitalism, Surveillance Capitalism: The Prison Telecommunications Industry. This talk discusses the prison telecommunications industry, with a particular focus on Securus Technologies and Global Tel Link. These companies facilitate racial capitalist accumulation by turning prisoners’ needs for social connection into a site of predatory extraction. The voice becomes a resource that is commodified and mined for data, and the data is then integrated into security products that are marketed and sold to prisons.

Jackie Wang is a black studies scholar, poet, multimedia artist, and Ph.D. candidate in African and African American Studies and History at Harvard University, specializing in race and the political economy of prisons and police in the US. She recently published a book titled “Carceral Capitalism” (Semiotext(e) / MIT Press) on the racial, economic, political, legal, and technological dimensions of the US carceral state. Her interest in this topic is rooted in her experience of having an imprisoned brother who was sentenced to juvenile life without parole as a teenager. She is the recent recipient of a fellowship at the Schlesinger Library, where she conducted research on the life and legacy of Angela Davis. She has also published a number of punk zines including On Being Hard Femme, and a collection of dream poems titled Tiny Spelunker of the Oneiro-Womb (Capricious).

Program

1:00-1:30 Welcome and introduction to the conference

1:30-2:30 First session, From Depression to Mobilization: Surviving and Politicizing Precarious Existence

Franco Palazzi, Depression in Neoliberal Academia: An Overview

Agnes Szanyi, Art Meets Life: Art Activism in the Center and the Semi-Periphery

Discussant: Caitlin Zaloom

2.30-3.30 Coffee Break

3:00-4:30 Second session, Instruments and Matrices: Credit Scoring, Value Chains, and Technology Transfers

Ella Coon, ROM Control Data: Corporate Diplomacy and Commercialized Computing, 1968-74

Santiago Mandirola, Credit for All: Scoring and Extraction across the Americas

Budi Akmal Djafar, Global Value Chain and Industrial Upgrading: The Case of the Automotive Industry in Indonesia and Thailand, 1995-2010

Discussant: Janet Roitman

5:00-6:30 Keynote lecture, Jackie Wang,Carceral Capitalism, Surveillance Capitalism: The Prison Telecommunications Industry

6:30 Reception