The Corporate Capture of the City: Documentary Screening + Q&A

Useless mega-developments, empty ‘investment’ properties, gated communities, mass foreclosures, social cleansing, home demolitions, and environmental destruction, are all symptoms of the way urban space has become a casino for speculative capital. And in this amoral urban casino bribery, market manipulation and fraud, are standard frameworks for engorging corporate profits, often with the complicity of public power brokers.

Join state/corporate crime researcher Professor Kristian Lasslett for a screening of the feature length documentary film The Opposition. The Opposition centres on the struggle to save a historic national park in the capital of Papua New Guinea, from a developer consortium led by Icelandic-Australian interests. Under the leadership of resident-activist Joe Moses, local communities mobilise through art, protest and litigation. They face the contradictory spectacle of paramilitarised police repression, sanitised by a transnational developer boasting corporate social responsibility credentials backed by the UNDP. As the campaign to save Paga Hill evolves, The Opposition, illuminates the underhanded methods used by state-corporate power to hand over public assets to private interests.

Watch film trailer

In the Q&A session Professor Lasslett will explain how he worked with local communities to penetrate the façade of corporate social responsibility, using investigate methods, open source data-sets, and digital data-analysis techniques. He will also discuss how state and corporate actors use their considerable resources and leverage to silence critics.

Speaker

Professor Kristian Lasslett is Head of the School of Applied Social and Policy Sciences at Ulster University. His research employs a range of interdisciplinary investigative methods to interrogate the systems, actors and transactions which prosecute grand corruption, large-scale land grabs, and human rights abuses in the extractives sector. Kristian’s findings have been published in a range of leading international journals, and in two books, State Crime on the Margins of Empire and The Crimes of Urbanisation. He has collaborated with filmmakers and artists, to create multimedia accounts that document abuses of power by state-corporate actors, and the grass-roots movements that attempt to bring these injustices to light under conditions of violence and repression.