Video and Audio Archive

UPCOMING EVENTS

September 16, 2008, Noon-2pm
Green College Coach House

"Worlding Cities, Pied-a-terre Subjects"

The rise of Asian cities as centers of spectacle and speculation
challenges conventional notions about the global city as a
site of universal human rights.  I argue that the ambitious Asian city
is a branded state-space, a spectralized site that coordinates
and generates flows of global knowledge, actors, and values.
Pied-a-terre subjects, especially knowledge nomads, are recruited
and favored for their production of diverse material and symbolic
values.  But, while pied-a-terre subjects are crucial to the prestige
and wealth of the worlding city, they are the embodiment of the
denationalized character of capitalism.  Poised between staying and going,
the knowledge nomad performs a transfer of value that shapes the
hyper-metropolis as both a national space and a site of mutating
citizenship.

Bio-note:

Aihwa Ong is Professor of Anthropology at the University of California,
Berkeley. She has conducted research on questions of  modernity,
citizenship, sovereignty, and neoliberalism in emerging Asia-Pacific
contexts.  She is the author of /Spirits of Resistance and Capitalist
Discipline: Factory Women in Malaysia /(1986); /Flexible Citizenship
/(1999); /Buddha is Hiding: Refugees, Citizenship, the New America/
(2003); and /Neoliberalism as Exception: Mutations in Citizenship and
Sovereignty/ (2006). Edited volumes include /Global Assemblages:
Technology, Politics and Ethics as Anthropological Problems /(co-editor
Stephen J. Collier, 2005) and /Privatizing China, Socialism from Afar
/(co-editor Li Zhang, 2008).  Her new work focuses on biotechnologies
and sovereignty in East Asia. Ong has lectured  around the world, and
her writings have been translated into Chinese, German,
Italian, and Portuguese.

October 3, 2008, Noon-2pm
Scarfe 310

Megan Boler, Darin Barney, and Douglas Kellner
UBC Celebrate Learning

Details forthcoming.

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Watch for announcements of upcoming events. These will include monthly Cafes, Food for Thought, PIE, XFRC, Artful Inquiry Salons, student-helping-student workshops, conferences, a Graduate Student Retreat, Graduation Celebrations, and many other events!