Anticipatory States and Planetary Peril
What are the emerging impacts of “pre-emption” as a key policy of the post-9/11 counter-terror state in the United States? In this lecture, Joseph Masco – professor at the University of Chicago and author of two award-winning books – traces the emergence of anticipatory governance from the Cold War to the War on Terror and considers the implications of pre-emption policy across a range of new objects and populations.  Masco argues that one of the lasting effects of the war on terror is a changed relationship to the future, and tracks a series of case studies that demonstrate the unforeseen aspects of pre-emption.
Joseph Masco is Professor of Anthropology and of the Social Sciences in the College writes and teaches courses on science and technology, U.S. national security culture, political ecology, mass media, and critical theory. He is the author of The Nuclear Borderlands: The Manhattan Project in Post-Cold War New Mexico (Princeton University Press, 2006), which won the Rachel Carson Prize from the Society for the Social Studies of Science and the Robert K. Merton Prize from the Section on Science, Knowledge and Technology of the American Sociology Association, and the J.I. Staley Prize from the School for Advanced Research. His most recent book is The Theater of Operations: National Security Affect from the Cold War to the War on Terror.  His current work focuses on the interplay between affect, technology, and threat perception on topics ranging from policing to national security to the environment.