11 December 2019
A one-day symposium organised by the Centre for the Americas (QUB) and Critical Research in States, Ecologies, and Societies (CRISES, Maynooth)

 

This two-day symposium, sponsored by the Centre for the Americas, the School of Arts, English and Languages, and the Senator George J Mitchell Institute for Global Peace, Security and Justice, will examines the cultures of the contemporary drugs wars primarily in the Americas. Working in the area and across a range of disciplines, including Criminology, English, Film, History, Modern Languages, Politics and IR, Philosophy and Sociology, scholars will consider how the thematizations of the drug trade in contemporary culture (e.g. media, TV, films, novels etc.) afford us pressing insights into the complex relationships between violence, borders, security, sovereignty and global capital. Particular attention will be paid to how or whether these thematizations obscure or illuminate the close relationship between the legal and illegal economy and between crime and capitalism – and hence on the ways that violent and non-violent acts combine to produce “an economic system that cares more for profit than for people” and a “war on drugs” that is more accurately characterized as a “war on the poor and the powerless, the voiceless and invisible” (Don Winslow, The Cartel).