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BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTAMP:20220331T122732Z
DTSTART:20220524T113000Z
DTEND:20220524T123000Z
SUMMARY:Margaret Hillenbrand - Feeling Precarious in China
UID:{http://www.columbasystems.com/customers/uom/gpp/eventid/}z1hw-l1dp1g
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DESCRIPTION:On the evening of November 18th\, 2017\, a blaze broke out in
  the basement of a two-storey building in Xinjian urban village\, locate
 d just outside Beijing’s Sixth Ring Road. At least 19 people\, including
  8 children\, died in the flames. Yet in the days that followed locals h
 ad no chance to mourn: before the gutted building was even fully soused\
 , the local authorities had issued a comprehensive eviction order for Xi
 njian. Using fire safety as its rationale\, the city government condemne
 d the entire settlement\, and its inhabitants\, perhaps as many as 250\,
 000 of them\, were forced to evacuate their homes. Xinjian had emblemati
 zed inequality and exclusion well before the fire and evictions of 2017\
 , and its residents long counted among contemporary China’s most precari
 ous people. What kind of change\, then\, might the evictions mark? Or to
  put this another way\, what does it mean to be officially banished from
  a place of already de facto exile? \n\nIn this talk\, I suggest that th
 e evictions provoke questions about the limits of inequality\, exclusion
 \, and and insecure work as meaningful descriptors of social conditions 
 in our times. These limits have prompted Saskia Sassen to argue that we 
 are now witnessing “the emergence of new logics of expulsion” in the glo
 bal political economy – forces which make the language we use to describ
 e immiseration on a systematic scale too tepid and which compel a rethin
 k of how we define precarity\, surely a master concept for the present. 
 In this talk\, I explore the logic of expulsion in contemporary China\, 
 its capacity to foment both solidarity and social strife\, and its relat
 ionship with cultural forms. In particular\, I look at how people living
  under precarity in China today use culture as a space to vent feelings 
 of rage\, resentment\, distrust\, and disdain that are taboo under the d
 iktats of so-called harmonious society. \n
STATUS:TENTATIVE
TRANSP:TRANSPARENT
CLASS:PUBLIC
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