Violence and Care in the Age of Necrocapitalism

Abstract: We are witnessing intolerable levels of violence across the globe. As scholars, how do we expose, articulate, and resist emerging forms of violence of our time? There is a pressing need to dissect varying mechanisms of violence to enable radical politics that can center, liberate, and sustain marginalized lives, especially given the new levels of state-sanctioned violence targeting minoritized individuals. Drawing on a few studies, this talk theorizes necrocapital legal violence, which is defined as a contemporary form of legal violence that enables accumulation that involves dispossession, alienation, and the subjugation of life to the power of death. In turn, I will connect this idea to the broader discussions of structural, necrocapital, and extreme violence to propose a feminist politics of care, which will serve as the foundation of new politics equipped to impossibilize old and new forms of violence. In doing so, I hope to co-constitute different methods of worldmaking with participants, collectively imagining new visions of equality, mutuality, and emancipation.

Bio: Heewon Kim is a scholar-activist committed to producing research that envisions and enacts alternative ways of organizing to advance liberation, dignity, and radical equality. Grounded in anticolonial, intersectional, and feminist scholarship, she advances scholarly and pedagogical missions to build a just and equitable world for all beings. Her organizational research centers on power/knowledge, (in)justice, and violence, with the aim of fostering voice and resistance among marginalized and minoritized groups. Her current projects examine state and legal violence against social activists, unions, migrant workers, and survivors of sexual violence, with attention to the novel forms of violence that emerge in neoliberal societies. She also actively publishes in her mother tongue, under her Korean name, 김정희원.

This seminar is both online and in-person:
Zoom Link