Event End: April 24, 2014 12:00 PM
Event Location: Orfalea Center Seminar Room
Event Details:
Speaker:
Matthew Sparke, University of Washington
As has been widely bemoaned, neoliberalism is a confusingly catch-all neologism for the complex congeries of pro-market ideologies, market rules, market ties and market innovations in personal morality associated with globalization. It also too quickly glosses over a significant transition in hegemonic development ideas and governmental practices that have been advanced by philanthropists in the aftermath of the so-called Washington Consensus. By focusing on global health in particular, and by examining the ways in which philanthropic interventions have sought to address the many ill-effects that structural adjustment policies had on health around the world, this talk suggests that we need to come to terms with a New Washington Consensus. Reversing the old ideas about wealth leading to health, the new normative expertise is that investments in health are a good way of helping individuals climb up the bottom rungs of the ladder of wealth. Such expertise does not go uncontested, of course, but it tends to function hegemonically as an anti-politics machine that systematically pulls civil society, NGOs and even governments themselves into an emergent global patchwork of public-private-philanthropic partnerships. These 3P partnerships tend in turn to be focused on post-national and post-political humanitarian interventions designed to foster the global viability of individual lives, rather than the social rights of national citizens. As such, the New Washington Consensus helps us name and conceptualize the ways in which the nationally-coordinated market fundamentalism of the Old Washington Consensus is increasingly replaced by a philanthropically-funded commitment to globalized market foster-care.
Matthew Sparke is Professor of Geography, International Studies and Global Health at the University of Washington, where he also serves as the Director of Integrated Social Sciences. He is the author of Introducing Globalization: Ties, Tensions and Uneven Integration (New York: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013), as well as In the Space of Theory: Post-foundational Geographies of the Nation-State (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press) and over 75 other publications. Based on grants from the National Science Foundation, the Mellon Foundation, and the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, his research is focused on the uneven geographies of globalization, including most recently, the epidemiologies of inequality embodied in global biological citizenship and its others.
http://faculty.washington.edu/sparke/
https://uw-us.academia.edu/MattSparke