Tactics at the Bakery
When:
—
Venue:
Birkbeck 10 Gower Street
No booking required
Speaker: Jose Ciro Martinez (Trinity College, Cambridge)
This paper explores a set of actions through which bakers manipulate laws and regulations that seek to organize and regulate how they do business. It builds on eighteen months of fieldwork conducted in Jordan, twelve of which were spent working in three different bakeries in the capital, Amman. By honing in on the bakery, and examining arrangements between bakery owners, workers, consumers and ministerial employees, the paper seeks to illuminate modes of political agency that escape conventional binaries of domination/resistance, state/society and legality/illegality. I argue against seeing these practices as easily categorized forms of resistance or frivolous acts of corruption. Nor are they simply reinforcements of hegemonic control. Instead, ‘tactics’ at the bakery subvert the order of things to serve other ends.
Foregrounding them in this analysis seeks not only to challenge views of power relations as strictly binary but to elucidate some of the ways in which citizens inhabit and engage with the neoliberal and authoritarian logics that pervade everyday life in Jordan.
If you would like to attend, please email Jason Edwards: j.edwards@bbk.ac.uk
For more information on the Food Working Group, visit the BISR website
Contact name:
Jason Edwards