A little late notice for this - but could be interesting for some of you. 

Best, 

Michelle

-- 
Dr Michelle Bastian
ESRC Centre for Research on Socio-Cultural Change (CRESC)
University of Manchester
[log in to unmask]
www.cresc.ac.uk/people/michelle-bastian


-----Original Message-----
From: Bussie Awosanya 
Sent: 08 November 2012 10:18
Subject: Geography seminar by Louise Amoore, Wed. 14th November



Wednesday 14th November, 330pm
[Location: Coupland3 Building, Theatre A:

The Politics of Possibility

Louise Amoore, Durham University


"The density of police and security agents suddenly palpable, along with visual scanning devices affixed to cornices, lampposts, and trees. The weight of what had happened here more than twenty years ago was still faintly present for Alex, as it always was when he came to the Footprint.
He perceived it as a sound out of earshot, the vibration of an old disturbance, more insistent than ever: a low, deep thrum, their hidden pulse [.]  It may be that two generations of war and surveillance had left people craving the embodiment of their own unease" (Jennifer Egan, A Visit from the Goon Squad 2010: 332).

In Jennifer Egan's Pulitzer prize winning novel, she foregrounds a specific temporality in the connections and correlations between people, places and events. The vivid characters in her novel are held together only by a set of loose associations . a marginal and fleetingly glimpsed character in one chapter becoming the protagonist in the next. Why is this significant for the study of contemporary political geography? Because it is a technique of political critique that occupies precisely the terrain of software, algorithm and association rules that .makes the links. and .flags the risks. of unknown and dangerous subjects. In this seminar I explore how it is that conventional scientific readings of the time and space of probability become reframed in what I call a politics of possibility. The politics of possibility acts not on the basis of some known series of past events or acts, but rather on the basis precisely of the improbable but possible impending catastrophe . the .low probability, high impact. event. Shattering the serial chain of events of probabilistic reasoning, the politics of possibility deploys a geometry of the array and the break. Using Egan.s novel as a counterpoint to the very techniques of war and surveillance she described in the lives of her characters, I suggest that it is unexpected associations and unanticipated events that become the significant .life signatures. in contemporary geopolitics.