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The Geography Colloquium Series, Spring 2013 presents jointly with the Department of Anthropology:


Karen O’Connor

PhD student

Department of Social Anthropology

York University, Toronto, Ontario

“Juggling Responsibilities in the Dark: Dominican Women’s Daily Lives with Unreliable Electrical Service”

 

Friday, March 29, 3:15p.m.

WILKESON 145H
(INSIDE GIAL COMPUTING LAB)

Many rural Dominican women describe the bitter contradictions of neoliberal democracy through their frustrations over the recurring blackouts, electrocutions, and electrical theft.  This talk will focus on the flows and stoppages of energy that delineate the unreliable contours of citizenship for rural Dominican women. Everyday habits and routines are altered by long blackouts, especially in rural areas with scant electrical service.  Gendered tasks in darkened domestic spheres are touched by growing neoliberal insecurity and structural violence, as women enter precarious relationships with multiple forms of power and human and non-human agency. Women’s narratives include stories of performing domestic chores in the dark, working abroad and using remittances to purchase new household appliances, and traumatic encounters with faltering biomedical technologies. The gendered and sexualized violence of the past dictatorships resonate alongside women’s present-day negotiations with new forms of structural violence, as they are expected to complacently manage their households with growing responsibilities, disappearing resources, and disintegrating services.

Bio: Karen O’Connor’s doctoral research explores changing formations of power and violence in the Dominican countryside.  She is completing her PhD in the Department of Social Anthropology at York University in Toronto.

 

Light refreshments will be served.

For more info on the Colloquium Series, contact Jared Aldstadt <geojared@buffalo.edu>.


This EVENT Co-SPONSORED by the GEOGRAPHY GRADUATE STUDENT ASSOCIATION (GGSA).

 

 

 

 

 

Previous Colloquia

To download a list of previous colloquium speakers from a given semester, please click on the appropriate link below. Note: All documents are in Microsoft Word format.

Please email geog@buffalo.edu for updates to this list.