---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Development Seminar <devsem@utoronto.ca>
Date: Thu, Oct 26, 2017 at 5:48 PM
Subject: Development Seminar Lecture by Dr Derek Hall: Neoliberalism's Commodification on Nov 3, 2017 @ 12pm, AP367
To: DEVSEMEVENTS-L@listserv.utoronto.ca


Friday, November 03, 2017

12:00PM to 2:00PM

Department of Anthropology, AP367
19 Russel St
Toronto, M5S2S2

Abstract: The idea that the world is moving towards, or has already
arrived at, a condition often referred to as ?the commodification of
everything? has become a staple of media, activist, and scholarly
commentary in the early 21st century. Critical political economists
have variously identified the commodification of everything as an
empirical condition characteristic of mature capitalism, as a
structural tendency inherent to capitalist social relations, and as an
neoliberal ideological project. In this talk, I challenge the idea
that universal commodification is a neoliberal goal in two ways: by
inquiring into what the implications of the existence of markets for
everything would be for market relations themselves, and by asking why
it is that neoliberal states and international institutions
criminalize and pathologize a wide range of markets that have
flourished in some non-neoliberal societies. I focus in particular on
possible markets in some of the most fundamental elements of human
societies, including violence, power, and credentials, and draw on
empirical evidence from early modern Europe and contemporary Eastern
Asia.

Speaker: Derek Hall is Associate Professor in the Department of
Political Science and the Balsillie School of International Affairs at
Wilfrid Laurier University. His research interests include the
political economy of food, agriculture, land and the environment in
Eastern Asia, and the theory and history of capitalism. He is the
author of Land (Polity, 2013) and, with Philip Hirsch and Tania Murray
Li, of Powers of Exclusion: Land Dilemmas in Southeast Asia (NUS Press
and University of Hawai?i Press, 2011). In 2009-10 he was an S.V.
Ciriacy-Wantrup Research Fellow at the University of California
Berkeley.

Co-Sponsored by the Development Seminar and the Center for South East
Asian Studies at the University of Toronto

Website:
https://utdevsem.wordpress.com/2017/10/25/neoliberalisms-commodifications/

Registration Link: http://anthropology.utoronto.ca/events/devsem-derek-hall/

Like our Facebook Page to follow updates: facebook.com/utdevsem

Twitter Handle: @utdevsem, hashtag #devsem