UCI Department of Women's Studies, Center for Persian Studies and Center for Ethnography present

"Weblogistan Goes to War: Representational Practices, Gendered Soldiers, and Neoliberal Diasporic Entrepreneurship"
with Sima Shakhsari, Postdoctoral Fellow, University of Houston
 
Wednesday, May 4, 2011
12:00–2:00 p.m.
Humanities Gateway, Room 1010

In this talk, which is based on twenty four months of combined online and offline ethnographic research, Shakhsari will address the production of the self-responsible individual in Weblogistan in relation to the project of militarism. Shakhsari argues that as a post-9/11 phenomenon, Persian language blogging is implicated in discourses of militarism and neoliberalism that interpellate the representable Iranian blogger as a gendered soldier of freedom in the market for information during the war on terror. Shakhsari will discuss the way that the willing diasporic blogger subject takes advantage of opportunities provided during the war on terror, thus becoming a neoliberal homo aeconomicus who is easily disposable as social solidarity is replaced with neo-liberal self-interest.

For further information, please contact Lilith Mahmud, lmahmud@uci.edu.
 

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