The Shock Doctrine
The second speaker at Barnard's public event on sexual and economic
justice was Naomi Klein, an award-winning journalist, syndicated
columnist, and author of the international best selling books No
Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies and The Shock Doctrine: The
Rise of Disaster Capitalism. Klein writes a regular column for The
Nation and The Guardian, and in 2004 her reporting from Iraq for
Harper's Magazine won the James Aaronson Award for Social Justice
Journalism. Klein's path-breaking work in charting the alternative
globalization movement and the rise of extreme forms of neoliberal
capitalism has made her one of the most influential and respected
figures speaking from the global left on issues of economic justice, but
she has also linked her work with gender concerns, and she has
documented the key role played by women's activism in forging
alternative economic futures.
Drawing on her book The Shock Doctrine, Naomi Klein's talk
foregrounds the crucial role played by crisis, and promises of security
from it, in current economic and political processes. Klein identifies
the post September 11th agenda focused on security and the war on terror
as the latest manifestation of the neoliberal project, evident in the
privatization of surveillance and of the state's disaster response, the
intensified policing of borders, and the for-profit incarceration of
those who are criminalized. She also links this project of privatization
and deregulation to increased precariousness, and to a new, normalized
relationship with crisis, wherein neoliberal policies have been imposed
all at once, in a rapid fire way intended to produce a disorientating
shock to the economic and political system. The neoliberal project
profits from containing and monitoring these precariously-positioned and
displaced people, and, as she explains, sexuality, along with
race/ethnicity, can be central to this process.
Video
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