Conferences Archive (2001-2002)

The Institute for the Humanities
The Medical Humanities Program
The Chicago Seminar
and The Gender and Women’s Studies Program
at the University of Illinois at Chicago
present a conference:

The Vulnerable Citizen:
Surveillance and Privacy in Everyday Life
October 19-20, 2001

The conference will focus on perceptions of vulnerability in everyday life in the United States. Speakers will explore the following issues: the paradoxical role of the state as regulator and guardian; voyeurism and confessionalism; technologies of surveillance, including medical, racial, consumer, and criminal profiling; monitoring in the home and workplace; and the strategic use of space to regulate movement, time and desire.

Meeting Rooms A, B and C, Student Services Building (SSB), 1220 W. Harrison
The University of Illinois at Chicago

Friday, October 19, 2001

1:00 p.m. 
Registration and coffee

2:00 p.m. 
Welcome

2:15 3:30 p.m.
Plenary Session
Richard Sennett, London School of Economics
“The Culture of Dependency”

3:45-5:15 p.m.
Panel One: Regulating Space
Dennis R. Judd, University of Illinois at Chicago
“Walling in Everyday Life: The Four Enclosures of Urban Space”
Evan C. McKenzie, University of Illinois at Chicago
“Private Governments and Fortified Enclaves in Post-Liberal America”
Susan S. Fainstein, Rutgers University
“Fences Sometimes Make Good Neighbors”

5:15 p.m.
Reception

6:00 pm.
Dinner

7:00 p.m.
Plenary Session
Wendy Kaminer, author and social critic
“Be Careful What You Wish For: The Cultural and Political Embrace of Surveillance”
(It will be possible to attend the 7:00 plenary session without purchasing a dinner ticket)

Saturday, October 20

9:45 am
coffee

10:00-11:30 a.m.
Panel Two: Monitoring Everyday Life
Lynn M. Paltrow, National Advocates for Pregnant Women
“Punishment and Prejudice: Judging Drug-Using Pregnant Women”
David Stovall, University of Illinois at Chicago
“Classroom Surveillance: Ritalin as Agent of Classroom Control”
Frances E. Dolan, Miami University of Ohio
“Battered Women, Petty Traitors, and the State”
Stephen Katz, Trent University
“Profiling the Lifecourse: The Aging-Market and the Posthuman `Senior’ Body”

11:30 am
Lunch

1:15-2:30 p.m.
Plenary Session
Randall L. Kennedy, Harvard University Law School
“Racial Profiling: Citizens, Police and the Uniform of Race”

2:45-4:15 p.m.
Panel Three: Surveillance and Citizenship
Sonya Michel, University of Illinois at Chicago
“The State Abhors a Vacuum: Filling In the ‘Missing Fathers’ in Single-Mother Households”
Douglas C. Baynton, University of Iowa
“The Inspection Line: Disabled Immigrants in the American Imagination”
Michael S. Sherry, Northwestern University
“‘The Homintern in the Arts’: Scandal Journalism and the Surveillance of Queer Artists during the American Cold War”

Conference Organizing Committee: Lennard Davis, English Department, Disability and Human Development; Dennis Judd, The Chicago Seminar, Political Science Department; Sonya Michel, Gender and Women’s Studies Program; Timothy Murphy, Medical Humanities Program; Suzanne Poirier, Medical Humanities Program; Mary Beth Rose, Institute for the Humanities, English Department; Linda Vavra, Institute for the Humanities.