This workshop seeks to bring together faculty and graduate students who are working on the role of confinement and captivity under capitalism(s) both historical and contemporary. While many scholars of capitalism insist on its essential relationship to movement and flow, capitalism is equally rooted in practices of confinement and captivity as a central strategy of accumulation. Capitalism was born through the physical enclosures of private property in Europe, but also depended on the confinement of the plantation and the slave ship, the enclosure of women into the domestic sphere, intensified technologies for confining and corralling non-human animals, the creation of colonial property and reservations, the rise of hermetically sealed nation-state borders, and confinement to the prison cell, among other phenomena.
We thus seek to bring together faculty and advanced graduate students who are working on novel approaches to capitalism, rooted in various forms of physical, ideological, or social forms of confinement and captivity. We hope in particular to bring together scholars from a variety of disciplinary fields as well as a variety of geographical and temporal specializations.
We imagine this workshop contributing to multiple scholarly discourses at once. We hope to receive contributions that draw on various scholarly literatures including critical race studies, prison studies, animal studies, feminist studies, post/anti/decolonial and settler colonial studies, and others.
The organizers hope that the contributions to the workshop will result in a special issue of an interdisciplinary journal.
Please send 500 word abstracts of proposed contributions to capitalism.confinement@gmail.com by February 15.
Important Dates
February 15: Abstracts due
March 1: Decisions communicated
May 27: Full paper submissions due for precirculation
June 16-17: Workshop
The workshop will take place virtually on zoom.