Re:sources / Re:lations with Working Group on Globalization and Culture

The Yale Working Group on Globalization and Culture will share our collective research on two ubiquitous words of our contemporary vocabulary: resources and relations. There was a meeting on May 16 (described below in thematic Clusters One)  and the next meeting will take place on June 6.

The current WGGC collective of Aanchal Saraf, Bench Ansfield, Clara Wilson-Hawken, Ever Osorio, Jessica Marion Modi, Lucero Estrella, Maru Pabón, Michael Denning, Monique Flores Ulysses, Peter Raccuglia, Salonee Bhaman, and Simon Torracinta — work in American studies, African-American studies, Latinx studies, history, literary criticism, science and technology studies, and women’s, gender and sexuality studies. WGGC will share their collective research on two ubiquitous words of our contemporary vocabulary: resources and relations.

THEMATIC CLUSTERS ONE: On Sunday May 16, we will present the first two clusters, Affordances for Whom? Making and Unmaking Resources, and Language as Resource and Relation. The first part explores how land, nature, people, and time are conceived of and transformed into “resources”: depictions of land as a resource for migrants, and of migrants for empires; of Indigenous land as a resource for extraction and settlement; and of time as an abstract resource for leisure in the twentieth century. The second part examines language, poetry, and political slogans as resources and relations from post-emancipation Black cultures to contemporary Mexican feminisms. How do the abstractions of the category of “resource” – enforced by states, settlers, or science – change the meanings of concrete things? Who gets to define how and for whom resources are made?

THEMATIC CLUSTERS TWO: On Sunday June 6, we will present the final two clusters: Source Memory: Relating Archival Contradictions and The Relations of Human Resources. The first part offers disparate meditations on the complex process of engaging with archival sources. Cohering around the verb “relate” – which means both to form an affinity or kinship with and to narrate a story – we take up stories of a record producer in everything but her own words, of an immigration bureaucracy’s interrogation of a man and his family, and of the piecing together of family histories in the intergenerational wake of an earthquake. Our final cluster probes the half-lives of human resources, from the origins of the discourse of human resources, to the depletion of inner resources and the politics of “burnout,” to the valuations of risk and life within viatical insurance in a pandemic.

The Working Group on Globalization and Culture http://wggc.yale.edu/ is an interdisciplinary cultural studies laboratory that has been practicing collective research at Yale University since 2003. Over the years, we have presented work at numerous cultural studies conferences as well at The Marxist Education Project, the Left Forum, Occupy Boston, and the World Social Forum. Projects have been published as “Going into Debt,” online in Social Text’s Periscope, and as “Spaces and Times of Occupation” in Transforming Anthropology; a collective interview regarding “Matters of Life and Death” appeared in Revue Française d’Études Américaines.

All events are sliding scale. No one is denied admission for inability to pay. Write to info@marxedproject.org to get what you need to attend these events or any other classes or events. We do record all events and classes.

For all those who are attending June 6 who would like to listen to the presentations from May 16, please write to info@marxedproject.org and request that the recording be sent to you via email.

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