CRESC Annual Conference
Promises: Crisis and Socio-Cultural Change
The University of Manchester, UK
Wednesday 5th-Friday 7th September 2012

Speakers include:

Barbara Adam (Social Sciences, Cardiff University)
Robert Boyer (ENS, Paris)
Will Hutton (Hertford College, Oxford University)
Elizabeth A. Povinelli (Anthropology, Columbia University)

plus 

Aditya Chakrabortty (The Guardian) and Paul Mason (BBC Newsnight)

In the midst of global financial crisis and radical transformations in states, institutions, environments and social relations, it is vital to explore the role promises play in effecting socio-cultural change. We use the word ‘promises’ to encapsulate the range of plans, policies, projects, dreams and visions that both open and close the possibility of different kinds of socio-cultural futures (and pasts). Asking ‘What promises are contained in the current moment of crisis? And ‘What social futures should we plan for or anticipate?’ The 2012 CRESC conference will explore how promises are made to work and fail in the following contexts and fields:
		
•	Capitalism: in the midst of rolling crisis, what are the (broken) promises of financialised and globalised capitalism? What rewards do consumption and investment now promise? 
•	Democracy: what projections can we make for future democracies, for forms of civic representation and participation? What futures are anticipated in the political reforms of crisis and in the actions of elites?   
•	Expertise: what are the prospects of the knowledge fields of politics, higher education, media, law, science and the sustainable environment? What is the emergent potential for new, progressive or transformative public knowledge?  
•	Intimacies: what promises are implicated in transformations of everyday intimacies and personal relationships? How are intimacies being re-configured through objects, networks, technologies and bodily practices? 
•	Cultures: what counts as a successful future in terms of cultural policy, production, participation, engagement or inclusion? Which histories and whose values underpin forecasts of lifestyles, life chances and cultural futures?
•	Methods: what methods and techniques meet the challenge of understanding complex patterns of socio-cultural change? How are we to understand promises when confronted by different (non)coherencies, (dis)connections, localities and dispersals?  

We invite paper contributions on these and related topics that seek to explore – both theoretically and empirically - the ways in which different plans, projects and visions are shaping social futures and patterns of socio-cultural change. We are concerned with how such promises inform and relate to concrete impacts, successes and failures - as well as their rhetorical function and their intended and unintended consequences. Overall, we aim to show how promises both sustain and transform socio-cultural worlds.   

Please submit either a) proposal for individual papers or b) full panel proposal by Friday 20th April 2012 
Proposal Forms can be downloaded from the CRESC website at by clicking on the following link:
http://www.cresc.ac.uk/events/cresc-annual-conference
and returned via [log in to unmask] 

 Alternatively, proposal forms can be returned to the following address - CRESC Conference Administration, 178 Waterloo Place, Oxford Road, University of Manchester, Manchester M13 9PL, UK. 
Tel: +44(0)161 275 8985 / Fax: +44(0)161 275 8985 
For more information please contact Dr Mark Banks, CRESC 2012 Conference Chair at [log in to unmask]


 

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