Economies of Dispossession

March 13-14, 2020

Dispossession, by virtue of its lack of “possession,” implies a placement outside of global economies based on private ownership. Dispossession is a constant and growing threat: dispossession due to the climate crisis; the mass dispossession of bodies from their homelands; the refusal of colonial nations to concede stolen land; and the neoliberal moves to render every cultural worker precarious and bound to debt. These forms of dispossession are made profitable under disaster capitalism. If possession is foregrounded in an exchange system based on privatized ownership, how might dispossession be a harbinger of this system’s demise? New modes of exchange, new circulations of making, thinking, and doing are necessitated, in which dispossession might be a nucleus for positive, resistant, and insurrectionary models.