Border Economies / Capitalist Imaginaries – Victoria Hattam in dialogue with CRITIQUE-SKAPE | March 21 2024

Lecture abstract:

How do the contradictory demands of border walls and supply chains co-exist? These two political forces push in opposite directions. Claims to sovereignty try to establish territorial limits while globalization, by definition, is a boundary crossing enterprise. Yet, both are flourishing.  Post-Brexit freeports and Trump’s border wall provide excellent research sites for examining how these contradictory demands are reconciled. Drawing on research in the US -Mexico border, Hattam traces global production networks: things are not made in one country and sold in another; they are produced across, or on top of, borders.  Attending to the infrastructures that allow sovereignty and global production to co-habit disrupts familiar concepts used to analyze globalization. Outsourcing, domestic content, and skill all need to be revisited. Doing so reorients accounts of inequality resetting the terrain of contemporary labor politics.

Victoria Hattam is the Leverhulme Trust Visiting Professor at University of Bristol and Professor of Politics, the New School for Social Research in New York.