Measures of Care and Race with Dr. Niyousha Bastani

Join us for "Measures of Care and Race" a public talk with Dr. Niyousha Bastani, Sawyer Seminar Postdoctoral Fellow. This Public Talk is part of a 2023-2024 Andrew Mellon Sawyer Seminar titled “Evasion: Thinking the Underside of Surveillance.”

About the talk:

In a world increasingly understood to be afflicted by crises of care, notions of well-being rooted in cognitive psychology now shape many popular measures for “becoming more caring” or “more ethical”. In this talk, I show how such measures of care can also be elusive modes of measuring distance from whiteness to determine who must be watched. The recent shift toward psychological approaches in global counter-extremism is one example of how measures of care determine the targets of surveillance. A re-consideration of the UK’s “world-leading” counter-extremism policy shows how anti-Muslim racism is instituted through psychological discourse. These “cognitive” understandings of care institute a racializing measure of being human – one that sediments popular imaginations today. Here we begin to unravel measures of care that elusively reinforce logics of race and racism. We can also ask, what does it mean to evade surveillance, when surveillance presents itself as care?