Affective Statecraft & the Regulatory Politics of Fear

The 3rd public talk in the Fall 2016 Proseminar Lecture Series on the theme of "Who the People: Punctuating Politics in the USA, Being America in the World"

Speaker: Zoe Samudzi, University of California--San Francisco 

Zoe Samudzi is a Sociology PhD student at the University of California, San Francisco in the Department of Social and Behavioral Sciences. She received her Bachelor of Arts (BA) in Political Science with a concentration in International Relations from the University of Pittsburgh, and she holds a Master of Science (MSc) in Health, Community, and Development from the Department of Social Psychology from the London School of Economics. Her dissertation "'I don’t believe I should be treated like a second citizen by anybody': Narratives of agency and exclusion amongst male and transgender female sex workers in Cape Town, South Africa" engages hegemonic gender constructs in South Africa as they affect identity construction and health of transgender women and cisgender men in sex work. Her academic interests pertain to hegemony and structural exclusion, epistemic and structural violences, and the race-ing and gendering of community health outcomes as informed by a black feminist perspective.

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The Division of Social Studies presents the Fall 2016 Proseminar in Humanistic and Social Scientific Inquiry, with the theme of "Who the People: Punctuating Politics in the USA, Being “America" in the World." This Fall, we engage with questions of the vitality, legitimacy, promise, im/possibility of democratic life that haunt one of the largest democracies in the world, which is also, indeed, one of the largest global imperial powers. How do the frames of polis, nation-state, colony, and postcolony intersect in the United States of America, and how are we to understand the people that fill out or outline these enclosures? What are the self-conceptions and proclamations, indeed also sighs and laments, of “the people” enclosed within these frames, and how do they impact the claims the people are able to make with regard to the meaning of politics, the political process, participation, and possibility--and indeed the very possibility of life within and without the polity. What must a transdisciplinary and decolonial inquiry into these matters of life and death look like, where does and must it happen, who does and must undertake it--and what affects and actions must it seek to enable and disable in us?