Tuesday, April 25
6:00 – 8:00 PM
Skylight Room (9100)

Michel Foucault famously argued that Chicago school neoliberalism was beyond normativity, uninterested in the disciplinary categories of perversion or deviance. Yet neoliberal scholars were far from libertarian when it came to the legal regulation of sexuality and entertained a much more complex relationship to moral philosophy than what is suggested by Foucault. In this workshop, Melinda Cooper, (author of Family Values: Between Neoliberalism and the New Social Conservatism, 2017), will elucidate what she sees as the moral economy of neoliberalism and its provenance in the poor law tradition of family responsibility. This event will bring together Melinda Cooper with Leigh Claire La Berge, a scholar who has worked on the intersection of neoliberalism and sexual politics.

Speakers

Melinda Cooper is Associate Professor in the School of Social and Political Science at the University of Sydney, Australia. She is the author of Family Values: Between Neoliberalism and the New Social Conservatism, and Life as Surplus: Biotechnology and Capitalism in the Neoliberal Era.

Leigh Claire La Berge is currently working on a book entitled Wages Against Artwork: The Social Practice of Decommodification, sections of which have been published in South Atlantic Quarterly and Postmodern Culture.  Her first book, Scandals and Abstraction: Financial Fiction of the Long 1980s (Oxford, 2015) tracked the contest between postmodern and realist fictions about finance in a nascent era of financialization, and her articles have appeared in Radical Philosophy, Studies in American Fiction, Criticism, Journal of Cultural Economy, and the Radical History Review. She is the co-editor, along with Alison Shonkwiler, of Reading Capitalist Realism (Iowa, 2014). She is assistant professor of English at the City University of New York (BMCC) and a faculty fellow at the Center for Place, Culture and Politics.

This event is sponsored by Zone Books, the Center for the Humanities, the PhD Program in Political Science, and the Center for Place, Culture and Politics at the Graduate Center, CUNY. It is free and open to the public.