Dear all,
Please find below Call for Papers for our panel at the Congress of the
International Society for Ethnology and Folklore in Zagreb, Croatia.
The call will close at midnight on *January 14th 2015**.*
Hope as Utopia? Narratives of Hope and Hopelessness
Numerous recent displays of public discontent, often accompanied by calls
for social change, have been driven by widespread feelings of hopelessness
in relation to existing social, economic and political orders. Such
narratives of hopelessness emphasize the impossibility of enduring the
status quo. At the same time, renewed feelings of hope are crucial for
imagining alternative realities: new narratives of hope posit that
different futures are possible. In this sense, hope is closely related to
the idea of utopia: both in its conventional sense as an unreal or lofty
ideal that can in practice betray the good intentions of its proponents (as
was arguably the case after the Arab Spring); as well as in the sense of
movement towards something that is not yet realized, but which exists as a
possibility and is thus not opposed to reality (as in the work of Ernst
Bloch).
This panel will use ethnography to examine feelings, perceptions and
narratives of hopelessness, as well as cases in which new circumstances,
organizations or approaches have encouraged renewed feelings of hope.
Questions to be explored may include the following: Do narratives of hope
promote utopian thinking? Can narratives of hopelessness be used to promote
social change? Does a hopeful attitude promote passivity, or can it
facilitate action (cf. Crapanzano 2003)? Are old categories of thought
preventing the emergence of hope, having themselves become an ‘apparatus of
hopelessness’ (much as Graeber [2011] argues that the association of market
and capitalism forecloses the possibility of imagining viable alternatives)?
For more information and instructions, see: http://www.siefhome.org/
congresses/sief2015/cfp.shtml
To propose a paper go to:
http://nomadit.co.uk/sief/sief2015/panels.php5?PanelID=3496
Iza Kavedžija
Postdoctoral Associate
Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology
University of Oxford
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