By Dominic Pfister (Department of Political Science)
As a political scientist focused on International Relations and Political Theory, and an employment background in healthcare technology, I am interested in exploring the relationship between security, a foundational concept in International Relations, and health, a concept that has become increasingly relevant in a year and a half of global pandemic. My interest is in the interconnection between security and health and, particularly, in the ways that these two concepts have been co-constitutive of one another in the modern West, as they both developed in an international environment of colonialism and racial hierarchization.
The Worlds in Contention conference brought together a diverse set of scholars from different disciplinary, theoretical, and substantive backgrounds to present new and in-progress work on topics as varied as the logistics of maritime trade, Mexican governmental anti-obesity propaganda in the time of Covid, and the importance of gold assets to the rise of the far-right Alternative für Deutschland party in Germany in the wake of the 2008 financial crash. Much of the material in the conference resonated with my own work. First, there were the papers and conference presentations that I felt were directly and clearly relevant to my own work. Chief among these was the paper and presentation by Dr. Alyshia Gálvez, a cultural and medical anthropologist, on governmental public health messaging on obesity as a comorbidity with COVID in Mexico. In the presentation, Dr. Gálvez detailed efforts by the Mexican government, especially President Andrés Manuel López Obrador and Health Minister Hugo López-Gatell, to relate COVID mortality to ongoing anti-obesity efforts. Through a detailed reading of one public health booklet and an analysis of the booklets message in the context of the relationship of the Mexican government to American snack and “junk food” manufacturers.
Dr. Gálvez’s work inspired me to consider a broader array of source material as I conduct my research on health and security. As Dr. Galvez’ paper and presentation demonstrated, government publications meant for public consumption can, when read alongside historical and political context, be potent sources for understanding a government’s position on a topic at a particular point in time. While I still expect my research into health and security to be focused on elite discourse about the topics, Dr. Galvez’s work inspired me to consider the sites of these elite discourses as broader and not separate than public discourse.
Although the connections of projects like that of Dr. Gálvez to my own work was readily apparent, I also found inspiration in more unexpected places. A major theme that that emerged in the conference was the materiality of phenomena which are often abstracted in both the academic literature and everyday conversation. Dr. Charmaine Chua, Dr. Thea Riofrancos, and Dr.
Hyun Ok Park wrote about maritime supply-chain management, the extraction of lithium used for batteries, and the making of yellow ribbons to commemorate the 2014 Sewŏl ferry disaster respectively. The three phenomena the presenters talked about all have distinctive materialities, whose importance to global process of capitalist reproduction can be hard to see against their repetitive instantiations that are often hidden in the plain sight of everyday life. All three presenters peeled back the curtain on these hidden processes and held them up to a critical light that illuminated their importance.
Dr. Chua’s piece, a review of two recent books on shipping and maritime logistics, connected the development of revolutions in maritime transport in the second half of the 20th century to the attempts of Western governments and economic elites to undercut national independence movements in the global South and to take advantage of cheap manufacturing labor in the Global South. Dr. Chua’s presentation used the example of the seemingly humble shipping container as it moved across oceans and continents to track how contemporary flows of material goods across the world are products of historically contingent processes and not some natural evolution from the maritime shipping of centuries past. Dr. Chua also tracked the human costs of the movement of cheap goods, discussing how the global shipping industry’s huge profitability and extreme volatility, driven by risk speculation, can lead to the collapse of shipping companies and the stranding at sea of the marginalized workers who make up the bulk of the maritime logistical workforce.
Dr. Chua’s work both complemented and was complemented by that of Dr. Riofrancos. While Dr. Chua’s globally oriented work focused on how and why material things move across the world, Dr. Riofrancos looked in-depth on how one crucial part of these material things, lithium for lithium-ion batteries, is extracted and how we can understand this extraction against a backdrop of geopolitics and “green” technology. In her paper and her presentation, Dr. Riofrancos detailed how states in the West are at the forefront of enabling and financing lithium battery supply chains in attempts to control what is seen as a strategically important energy resource and to assert their preeminence in a volatile geopolitical order. She also emphasized how these governments are encouraged and in collaboration with corporations attempting to “green” their image and how, ironically but unsurprisingly, the results of these efforts result in the ramping up of resource extraction, population displacement, and the destruction of the natural environments where extraction takes place.
Dr. Park’s work on protests after the 2014 Sewŏl ferry disaster, the anemic response by President Park Geun-hye’s government which eventually led to the President’s impeachment and conviction in 2017, uses materiality in a surprising and innovative way. In a paper and presentation that linked fascism, neoliberalism, and the “true face’ of corporate elite dominated democracy, Dr. Park focused on an unexpected materiality associated with the aftermath of the Sewŏl ferry disaster: yellow ribbons. Dr. Park uses the Yellow Ribbon Workshop, a spontaneous, volunteer-based community-run workshop that produced yellow ribbons made of fabric and foam everyday for nearly five years, to ruminate on how different forms of political practice shaped South Korea by confronting the historical present of the Sewŏl ferry disaster through a sociality that was largely anonymous, non-identarian, and materially, banal. But through the banality of repetitively fashioning ribbons for weeks and months and years on end, Koreans engaged in a form of direct action that ultimately proved powerful enough to topple a government.
Dr. Chua’s, Dr. Riofrancos’, and Dr. Park’s presentations pushed me to consider the importance of materiality in my own work. Because I am interested in the development of concepts and the discourses that produce and enable them, I find that I easily miss the materiality of concepts like health and security. But MRI machines and tanks, bones and borders are material things that exist in interconnected material and discursive webs. I realized over the course of the conference that I need to think in greater depth about how materiality is key to understandings of health and security, while avoiding material reductionism that can sometimes mark studies of security. Dr. Park’s paper in particularly also helped me to think more deeply about how banal materialities can be politically potent and important because, and not despite of, their banality.
The Worlds of Contention conference was a unique opportunity for OSU community members to listen to, learn from, and ask questions of a set of exciting and innovative scholars. I thank the organizers, the presenters, and the organizational and technical support team for making the conference a reality, especially in a time when conferences and other traditional academic venues of communication have been disrupted.