ICS Seminar

From the naked images of x-ray airport scanners to counterterrorist obsession with the sexual lives of Muslims, neoliberal securityscapes are increasingly located in and fought over the intimate spheres of human life.

This paper aims to grapple with the intimate developments of security discourses, technologies and practices, in order to shed light on the logic of securityscapes under racial neoliberalism.

If, as David Theo Goldberg argues, racial neoliberalism evacuates race from the state while defending the privatization of racism (through discourses of choice and liberty), this is sustained in part through the privatization of security, which provides both a rhetoric and justification for the continued use of race for the management of daily life.

Dr Gilbert Caluya is ARC DECRA Fellow and ResearchSA Fellow with the International Centre for Muslim and non-Muslim Understanding, University of South Australia. Gilbert’s research focuses on the intersections of race and intimacy in everyday culture, which he has explored in queer cultures, security cultures and currently cultural citizenship. His current ARC-funded research project examines intimacy as a site for managing Muslim populations in the West (Australia, UK and USA) through notions of citizenship, civility and civilisation. Gilbert’s research has been published in Emotion, Space and Society; Intercultural Studies; Social Identities and Continuum, and he has co-authored chapters with Prof. Elspeth Probyn in the SAGE Handbook of Cultural Analysis and the SAGE Handbook of Feminist Theory. His book project, provisionally titled ‘Terror’s Territories: Intimate Securityscapes of Racial Neoliberalism’, examines the privatization of security as an index for the rise of racial neoliberalism.

Please send RSVPs to ics@uws.edu.au by April 27.