Keynote Address for Day 2 of Policy & the Everyday Conference
UMass Amherst Alumna Susan Brin Hyatt, Associate Professor of Anthropology, Indiana University-Purdue University, Indianapolis
What Was Neoliberalism and What Comes Next? Theorizing Citizenship in the Law-and-Order State
In 1996, Katherine Verdery published her well-known book What was socialism and what comes next? in which she interrogated the effects of the transition from socialism to capitalism, particularly with respect to theorizing emergent democracies in the former Eastern bloc countries. In this talk, Dr. Hyatt draws on Verdery's work as a model for talking about what she suggests is a similar transition away from neoliberalism and toward far more repressive mechanisms of governance in both the U.S. and the U.K. Using ethnographic data based on her studies of grassroots movements in both countries, she argues that the shift from "citizen" to "consumer" under the social, political and economic regimes of neoliberalism has left people far less able to effectively resist the increasingly authoritarian forms of rule that have characterized "democracy" in the post-9/11 world.