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Dear list members,
Please take note of the conference announcement below and distribute it to interested colleagues.
Best regards,
Andrea Behrends
Khartoum International Conference
28 February – 2 March 2011
Translations of travelling legal, organisational, and technological models in African contexts
Call for Papers
This international conference will concentrate on legal, organisational and technological dimensions of transformations in African contexts, brought about by travelling elements of normative and epistemic material orders. These elements are conceptualised in some particular place and time with a particular aim and institutional background. As models, they are then sent to and put to use in a very different place with a different institutional background and, thus, a different understanding of the model’s original aims and purposes. The conference seeks to examine the links between the travelling models and the local fields of governance, law or conflict management into which they are immersed. Which available models are selected and which are rejected? How are they translated, and what impact do they have on the local context? How does the local translation contribute to the shaping of a globalized model?
While some scholars emphasize the importance of external influences on the African continent, others try to show the independence, ingenuity and, less often, responsibility of local agency. We invite papers that seek to explore the plausibility of another approach – an approach that avoids the juxtaposition between autochthonous and imported social and cultural forms. We proceed from the assumption that throughout Africa, like elsewhere, most social and cultural transformations are entangled with transformations that take place on other continents. In order to examine trans-local entanglements we shift our focus to the interstitial spaces and forms of distributed agency where translation occurs.
Local and trans-local determinants generally shape governance structures, the rule of law or conflict management – particularly in Africa. Once, for example, a conflict has erupted and turned violent, it develops its own momentum that can no longer be sufficiently explained by reference to the determinants of the outbreak. This is well known and has been extensively analyzed. Less explored is the impact that travelling concepts ("apartheid" or "power-sharing") and political technologies ("truth and reconciliation commissions" or "community courts") have on the dynamics of a conflict. Travelling concepts and political technologies serve to interpret local circumstances and shape the way they are dealt with.
While our main interest is to shed light on present-day processes, we also invite papers dealing with historical case studies. Besides papers from anthropology we encourage contributions from history, history and sociology of science and technology, law, political sciences, and economics.
The conference will be organized by Prof. Richard Rottenburg and Dr. Andrea Behrends of the Seminar for Anthropology in Halle/Saale (Germany) in cooperation with Prof. Musa Adam Abdul-Jalil, Head of the Department of Sociology and Social Anthropology of Khartoum University (Sudan) as part of the “Travelling Models in Conflict Management” research programme (financed by the Volkswagen Foundation).
The conference will take place in Khartoum from 28 February to 2 March 2011. The working language will be English.
Proposals for papers should be submitted by 15 September 2010 by email to the address below. Accepted contributors will be expected to send their full texts by 15 January 2011.
Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg
Seminar für Ethnologie
Reichardtstr. 11
D-06114 Halle/Saale
Germany
Tel: +49 345 55 24 196
e-mail: [log in to unmask]
http://www.ethnologie.uni-halle.de/forschung/projekte/travellingmodels/
Dr. Andrea Behrends | Seminar for Social Anthropology | Martin Luther University D-06099 Halle, Germany | Phone 0049-345-5524196 | Fax 0049-345-5527326
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