Dear all,
We are looking for fellow panelists for the upcoming AAAs. Please feel free to circulate.
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Call for Papers: The Future Strikes Back!
Annual Meeting of the American Anthropological Association
Nov 18-22, 2015, Denver, CO
Co-organizers: Alexandra Schindler, Romm Lewkowicz, and Zeynep Oguz (The Graduate Center at the City University of New York)
The future is striking back. From disastrous climate change prophecies and lethal epidemics, to unprecedented human displacement and emerging security “threats” to the so-called Western civilization from the “East,” the return of pre-modern dystopias and past catastrophes is looming over contemporary political landscapes. They fuel the political imagination of the contemporary, pointing to horizons of futurity fraught with environmental, financial, and humanitarian crises. Apocalyptic imaginaries have been integral to Western thought since Christianity, but now, they seem to “preach an apocalypse without the promise of redemption” (Swyngedouw 2010). Laden with crisis, depletion, and extinction, the return of catastrophic futures conjure up the need to predict, prepare for, and act upon (Anderson 2010, Cooper 2010, Evans and Reid 2014, Lakoff 2008). Anticipating apocalyptic, eschatological, and millennial futures deeply condition present policies, financial regimes, grassroot projects, direct state interventions, and individual actions in the now. They unsettle national and global narratives of the past, invoke marginalized historical futures, and recalibrate the body politic. Inviting scholars to think beyond and before the “end times” through these very end times, we ask:
• What happens when the (near or far) future is marked as apocalyptic, catastrophic, or disastrous?
• How do apocalyptic futures reconfigure the past, national and global histories, or individual and collective memories? What kinds of pasts are invoked for the catastrophe that is yet-to-come?
• What kinds of alternative temporal and political horizons do apocalyptic futures foreclose or enclose?
• Do the shocks and disturbances that apocalyptic imaginaries mark in everyday life provide an opening to challenge the conditions that produce those futures?
We invite panel abstracts for contemporary or historical anthropological work on the affective, cultural, temporal, and (bio)political aspects of “the future” as a horizon that is saturated with crisis, disaster, and “end times”; as a conceptual possibility that unsettles linear understandings of the present and the past, or as an analytical tool to reconfigure categories such as politics, nature, and time. We welcome submissions on diverse topics and themes including (but not limited to):
• ‘Natural’ disasters
• Environmental degradation, climate change, and the Anthropocene
• Financial regimes
• Security, militarization
• Biomedicine, health, diseases
• Wars, refugees, camps
• Bodies, sexuality, and queer futures
• Fossil fuels, renewables, nuclear energy
• Privatization, dispossession
• Technology, infrastructure
• Science fiction
Potential participants should send their abstracts (250 words max) to Zeynep Oguz ([log in to unmask]) by April 8th, 2015. Please include the title of the paper, author’s name, affiliation, and email.
Please also note that panelists should be registered for the AAA before April 15th.
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