Victoria Hattam is interested in reimaging economic life. In the GIDEST seminar, she will complete a book on the shifting relationship between design and production in the global economy. At its core, globalization has presumed distance to be of little consequence: designing things in one place and making them in another allows multi-national corporations to arbitrage costs globally. However, navigating international production processes has proved difficult: global supply chains are unruly things.  Trump, Brexit, and a variety of right wing populist movements have been challenging the very premises of globalization through a series of nationalist counter-politics presenting us with the unappealing choice of globalization on the one hand and nationalist backlash on the other. But economic nationalists are not the only ones rethinking distance. Many are imagining new ways forward. Hattam considers three “proximity experiments” where design and production are being reconfigured: manufacturing hubs in Brooklyn; cross-border production in the Rio Grande Valley; and shifts within global supply chains themselves. In all three examples, proximity is being revalued albeit in very different ways. It is not at all clear whether these experiments will last, but the political stakes are high - Hattam wants to take their measure. Visual and spatial dynamics are central to shifting economic imaginaries at the center of this project.

A Professor of Politics at The New School, Hattam received her Ph.D. in Political Science from MIT. In 2019, she co-directed the Mellon funded Sawyer Seminar on Imagined Mobilities. She is a member of the Multiple Mobilities Research Group and of the Transoceanic Mobilities Network.