Talk by Professor Miriam Ticktin, the New School for Social Research
Date: Thursday, October 8, 2020
Time: 12:15 PM – 1:45 PM
Location: Zoom
Professor Ticktin’s talk on Racial Innocence will launch our year-long speakers’ series on Structural Violence. Culture, Power, and Social Change is a colloquium series in the Department of Anthropology that is aimed at an interdisciplinary audience of graduate students from a range of departments including anthropology, gender studies, sociology, ethnic studies departments, world arts and cultures/dance, ethnomusicology, urban planning and public policy, and the School of Medicine.
This talk addresses the relationship between innocence and politics; even as innocence is defined against politics, as freedom from the worldly and unworldly – my argument is that innocence is deployed in politically potent ways . Indeed, I suggest it has moved to the center of political life today. The larger book of which this is a part investigates how discourses and images of innocence get assembled and weaponized across the fields of immigration, gender politics, racial politics and environmentalism. It is a flexible concept that intimately shapes why and how we should care, for whom, and whose lives matter. I will focus on innocence as a racialized tool that is central to border regimes—I will discuss both European and American borders — producing the difference between deserving and undeserving, refugee and economic migrant, and ultimately functioning to redraw understandings of “humanity” and its constituent outsides.
Professor Miriam Ticktin has served as Director of Gender Studies, Chair of Anthropology, and Co-Director of the Zolberg Institute on Migration and Mobility at the New School. Her work sits at the intersection of the race and immigration studies, anthropology of medicine, and transnational and postcolonial feminist theory.
Co-Sponsored by
- Center for the Study of Women
- Center for European and Russian Studies
