Papers
Feminist Critique: Eastern European Journal of Feminist and Queer Studies, 2019
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This paper offers preliminary reflections on the relationship between the seemingly opposed logic... more This paper offers preliminary reflections on the relationship between the seemingly opposed logics of white supremacy and racial liberalism by sketching the contours and workings of what the authors call technoliberalism. First, the article briefly overviews the relationship between the discourse of " white loss, " immigration and automation in contemporary US national politics. It then addresses how technoliberal imaginaries that argue that it is robots, not racialized others, who are taking US jobs, pin their anti-racist logics on a post-racial technological future. Through examples of robotic and digital technologies intended to replace human bodies and functions, the paper thus excavates the suppressed racial imaginary " technoliberalism. "
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The introduction to this special issue offers a theorization of postsocialism as an analytic that... more The introduction to this special issue offers a theorization of postsocialism as an analytic that connects the ‘afters’ of the capitalist–socialist dynamic to think about how political action need not take shape in ways that are familiar as revolutionary, or oppositional. We argue that postsocialism marks a queer temporality, one that does not reproduce its social order even as its revolutionary antithesis. Resisting the revolutionary teleology of what was before, postsocialism creates space to work through ongoing legacies of socialisms in the present. Secondly, we assert the need for pluralizing postsocialisms as a method, which brings to the fore current practices, imaginaries, and actions that insist on political change at a variety of scales, including local, state, and transnational ones. Pluralizing postsocialisms as a method and considering it necessary for analysis of a global postsocialist condition can provide a crucial analytic through which to assess ongoing socialist legacies in new ethical collectivities and networks of dissent opposing state- and corporate-based military, economic, and cultural expansionism since the end of the Cold War.
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European Journal of Cultural Studies, 2009
This article addresses contemporary Roma rights issues in Central and Eastern Europe by exploring... more This article addresses contemporary Roma rights issues in Central and Eastern Europe by exploring the relationship between internet technologies and the discourses surrounding human rights and the post-socialist transition. Because the Roma are a transnational European minority ethnic group, they have been used as a 'test case' by western human rights groups to evaluate minority rights in post-socialist nations. The article highlights the role of new media technologies in redirecting concerns about the lack of human rights in Europe as a whole to the former Eastern bloc countries. It draws attention to the limits of western liberal discourses and new media technologies to redress racial and material discrimination against the Roma.
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Cinema Journal, 2014
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American Ethnologist, 2011
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The Journal of American Culture, 2006
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Historical forms of domination and power, encompassed but not limited to social categories and hi... more Historical forms of domination and power, encompassed but not limited to social categories and hierarchies of difference, get built into seemingly non-human objects and the infrastructures that link them, thus sanitizing digital media technologies as human-free. Rather than questioning the epistemological and ontological underpinnings of the human, fantasies about the revolutionary nature
of new media and technology developments as posthuman carry forward and reuniversalize the historical specificity of the category “human” whose bounds they claim to surpass. To begin to theorize some of the ways in which the notion of a revolutionary network of humans and things is both racial and racializing, the first part of this article develops a reading of Sylvia Wynter’s theorization of modern “man” as fundamentally constructed through racial-scientific notions of the biological and economic. We then think Wynter’s notion of homo-oeconomicus alongside Rifkin’s postulation that in fact the infrastructure revolution marks a paradigm shift away from capitalism. Through an analysis of several contemporary platforms (including Alfred and Amazon Mechanical Turk), we address the global-racial erasures and disappearances undergirding technoutopic fantasies of a post-labor society. At the same time, as we argue, it is insufficient to merely point out the way in which human racialized and gendered labor underwrites techno-utopic fantasies. Instead, we move to a consideration of the epistemological and material shifts as well as legacies tied to prior post-Enlightenment revolutionary thought, such as that of Franz Fanon, to reconceptualize who or what can count as human. In conversation with feminist science studies scholarship on the posthuman, we grapple with what it means to think the subject of labor, and the human as subject, outside of the biological economic imperatives of prior imaginaries.
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Journal Articles and Book Chapters
This article examines postsocialism as an emerging theoretical concept to assess the contestation... more This article examines postsocialism as an emerging theoretical concept to assess the contestations of liberalism and fascism in public spaces. Focusing on recent political events in Romania and the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, we address how post-Cold War figurations and erasures of socialism circulate in both expected and unexpected ways in recent instances of protest. Rather than fall into stereotypical invocations of Eastern Europe as a historical and geopolitical site from which to theorize the prefiguration of illiberalism and totalitarianism in a post-Brexit and post-Trump era West, we instead ask, what can Eastern European postsocialist politics teach us about the perils of liberalism? We highlight how the reorganization of public space undergirds the conditions of forgetting that enable postsocialist disaster capitalism, which, as we contend , speaks not only about Eastern European specificity, but also more broadly about the contradictions of Euro-American liberalism made apparent in its recent crises.
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Articles
Spheres: Journal for Digital Cultures, 2020
To answer how sex, reproduction, and labor are co-articulated in
robotics technologies that perpe... more To answer how sex, reproduction, and labor are co-articulated in
robotics technologies that perpetuate capitalist racial and colonial modes
of expansion and acceleration, this article examines how the category of
‘reproductive labor’ can be brought to bear upon fantasies of sex robotics
and non-sex robotic projects that are about robot reproduction. As we’ve
argued elsewhere, technologies that perform labor in place of humans
(including sex work) still have a human cost, despite a resolute desire to
see technology as magical rather than the product of human work. This
is because technoliberalism – the investment in technological futures that reaffirm the subject, political economy, and social life of the present –
obscures the actual labor, now unrecognized either as human-performed
or even as labor, required to support robotic activity.
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(Re)thinking Postsocialism: Interview with Neda Atanasoski and Kalindi Vora, 2019
What is the place of postsocialist studies in the conversations about global coloniality of power... more What is the place of postsocialist studies in the conversations about global coloniality of power? The term “postsocialism” is often used solely in relation to the specific former state socialist spaces and is rarely included in the scholarly discussions about colonialism and imperialism. This approach narrows the possibilities of other interpretations and analytic potential of postsocialism. Also, the predominance of “racelessness” and the idea of the inapplicability of “race” to the former state socialist region reinforces hierarchical scripts that lead to the exclusion of non-Slavic people and perpetuates racialization in the regions. In the interview, we are searching for the forms of thinking that allow a disruptive potential of knowledge production and radical thinking that counteracts the standardized, simplified and one-dimensional interpretation of postsocialism. Can postsocialism simultaneously be a critique of coloniality of knowledge, of imperial and colonial difference, and a theory of political action, ethical solidarity, and coalitions? The interview with Neda Atanasoski and Kalindi Vora pushes the bounds and definition of postsocialism by freeing it from a homogenized history tied to state socialism and European thought of traditional Marxian teleologies. Atanasoski and Vora make a powerful intervention into conceptualizations of postsocialism, focusing on the legacies of a plurality of socialisms and postsocialism as a global condition and a temporal analytic that questions the very forms of established thinking and paradigms of epistemological genealogies. The interview aims to contemplate on radical possibilities of postsocialisms and to situate the former state socialist regions, such as Balkans and Eastern Europe, in the conversations about global coloniality.
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of new media and technology developments as posthuman carry forward and reuniversalize the historical specificity of the category “human” whose bounds they claim to surpass. To begin to theorize some of the ways in which the notion of a revolutionary network of humans and things is both racial and racializing, the first part of this article develops a reading of Sylvia Wynter’s theorization of modern “man” as fundamentally constructed through racial-scientific notions of the biological and economic. We then think Wynter’s notion of homo-oeconomicus alongside Rifkin’s postulation that in fact the infrastructure revolution marks a paradigm shift away from capitalism. Through an analysis of several contemporary platforms (including Alfred and Amazon Mechanical Turk), we address the global-racial erasures and disappearances undergirding technoutopic fantasies of a post-labor society. At the same time, as we argue, it is insufficient to merely point out the way in which human racialized and gendered labor underwrites techno-utopic fantasies. Instead, we move to a consideration of the epistemological and material shifts as well as legacies tied to prior post-Enlightenment revolutionary thought, such as that of Franz Fanon, to reconceptualize who or what can count as human. In conversation with feminist science studies scholarship on the posthuman, we grapple with what it means to think the subject of labor, and the human as subject, outside of the biological economic imperatives of prior imaginaries.
Journal Articles and Book Chapters
Articles
robotics technologies that perpetuate capitalist racial and colonial modes
of expansion and acceleration, this article examines how the category of
‘reproductive labor’ can be brought to bear upon fantasies of sex robotics
and non-sex robotic projects that are about robot reproduction. As we’ve
argued elsewhere, technologies that perform labor in place of humans
(including sex work) still have a human cost, despite a resolute desire to
see technology as magical rather than the product of human work. This
is because technoliberalism – the investment in technological futures that reaffirm the subject, political economy, and social life of the present –
obscures the actual labor, now unrecognized either as human-performed
or even as labor, required to support robotic activity.
of new media and technology developments as posthuman carry forward and reuniversalize the historical specificity of the category “human” whose bounds they claim to surpass. To begin to theorize some of the ways in which the notion of a revolutionary network of humans and things is both racial and racializing, the first part of this article develops a reading of Sylvia Wynter’s theorization of modern “man” as fundamentally constructed through racial-scientific notions of the biological and economic. We then think Wynter’s notion of homo-oeconomicus alongside Rifkin’s postulation that in fact the infrastructure revolution marks a paradigm shift away from capitalism. Through an analysis of several contemporary platforms (including Alfred and Amazon Mechanical Turk), we address the global-racial erasures and disappearances undergirding technoutopic fantasies of a post-labor society. At the same time, as we argue, it is insufficient to merely point out the way in which human racialized and gendered labor underwrites techno-utopic fantasies. Instead, we move to a consideration of the epistemological and material shifts as well as legacies tied to prior post-Enlightenment revolutionary thought, such as that of Franz Fanon, to reconceptualize who or what can count as human. In conversation with feminist science studies scholarship on the posthuman, we grapple with what it means to think the subject of labor, and the human as subject, outside of the biological economic imperatives of prior imaginaries.
robotics technologies that perpetuate capitalist racial and colonial modes
of expansion and acceleration, this article examines how the category of
‘reproductive labor’ can be brought to bear upon fantasies of sex robotics
and non-sex robotic projects that are about robot reproduction. As we’ve
argued elsewhere, technologies that perform labor in place of humans
(including sex work) still have a human cost, despite a resolute desire to
see technology as magical rather than the product of human work. This
is because technoliberalism – the investment in technological futures that reaffirm the subject, political economy, and social life of the present –
obscures the actual labor, now unrecognized either as human-performed
or even as labor, required to support robotic activity.