This CFP should be of interest to some on this list:
Call for Papers
Movement, Power and Place in and beyond Central Asia
Guest Editor: Madeleine Reeves, University of Manchester
Central Asia has been, and continues to be, profoundly constituted by the movement and circulation of people and things. Some of these movements have figured centrally in the imagination of this region as a site of trade, exchange and cultural mixing: Central Asia as Silk Road in miniature. Other forms of movement - of narcotics, of arms, or of border-violating militants, by contrast, have played into an opposed, but no less powerful imagination of Central Asia as a locus of danger or subject to threat. Less often explored - and what this Special Issue seeks to foreground - are the complex dynamics of people and things on the move, and the ways in which such movements are shaped by, or become constitutive of, relations of power. Rather than analysing 'flows' in the abstract, this volume will enquire about the situated practices, material infrastructures and political relations through which people, ideas, images and things move or are moved; cross, and remake boundaries of various kinds. As such it seeks to advance our understanding of the intersections between movement, power and place in and beyond Central Asia, in settings both 'exceptional' and mundane.
This approach invites contributions that engage material from diverse historical periods and theoretical perspectives. Abstracts are welcome from the growing cohort of scholars exploring issues of international, inter-regional and cross-border migrations in Central Asia. But the framing of the Special Issue also encourages engagements with forms of movement and place-making which, because they are not normally spoken of as 'migrations' or do not involve obvious 'border-crossings' are rarely explored within the same analytic frame: the seasonal movement of pastoralist herders, for instance; the movement of market traders between village and town, the circulation of Soviet engineers between urban construction projects throughout Soviet Central Asia, the movement of daughters in marriage, or the displacement of families through war, natural disaster, or state-led attempts at 'modernization'. Contributions are equally encouraged that examine the ways in which particular kinds of movement - and limitations upon movement - figure in the production of social hierarchies: how authority is spatialized in domestic settings, for instance; or how new forms of spatial segregation articulate with social hierarchies in the production of urban space.
The Special Issue does not aim to privilege any particular discipline and contributions are invited that seek to draw theoretical insight from the rich detail of empirical research, whether this draw upon ethnographic, sociological, or archival data. Such questions might include, but are not confined to, the following:
* How might attention to movement allow us to question a 'sedentarist metaphysic' (Malkki) in our analysis of Central Asia - the tendency to treat culture as 'rooted' in place? How are mobilities regulated and policed, formally and informally? How are mobility and immobility gendered? How is movement used to enact (and contest) social hierarchies of various kinds? How did and do particular technologies - such as railways, air transport, mobile telephones, machine-readable passports, barbed wire fencing or satellite dishes enable and constrain new forms of practical and imaginative connection across space? How have places and homes been remade, historically and today, as a result of new kinds of movement, including exile, labour migration, the return of co-ethnics to their 'historical homeland', or displacement through war or natural disaster? What do new kinds of movement do for our categorizations of various kinds of place in Central Asia: as 'rural' or 'urban'; 'traditional' or 'modern'; 'central' or 'marginal'? How might new forms of movement challenge us to (re-) think the bounds of Central Asia as a world region?
Paper proposals of up to 500 words and a short accompanying biographical statement should be sent to [log in to unmask] by 10 March 2010. Selected contributors will be invited to submit a complete paper by 15 September 2010, which will then be subject to peer review. Papers are scheduled to appear in Central Asian Survey in the spring of 2011.
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Dr Nick Megoran,
Lecturer in Political Geography,
GPS Office, 5th Floor, Claremont Tower,
School of Geography, Politics and Sociology,
Newcastle University, NE1 7RU.
United Kingdom.
Tel: +44 191 222 6450
url: www.megoran.org
"In our time of wars, of national self-conceit, of national jealousies and hatreds ably nourished by people who pursue their own egotistic, personal or class interests, geography must be - in so far as the school may do anything to counterbalance hostile influences - a means of dissipating these prejudices and of creating other feelings more worthy of humanity." Peter Kropotkin, 'What geography ought to be', 1885.
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