Call for Papers for AAA 2016. *Please circulate widely*

PANEL TITLE

Political Evidence(s): Security, Racism, and Resistance in North America

ABSTRACT

From highly securitized urban centers, to militarized borders, police
killings, and the rising tide of Islamophobic discourse in immigration
debates, the contemporary political moment in North America is one in which
practices of security and racialized fears have become an important and
explosive brew. As increasing anxieties about “terrorism” fuel racist
security discourses in the international sphere, growing economic precarity
is fueling renewed racialization, violence, and stigmatization of black and
brown populations at home. And yet, at the heart of the violent
intersection of securitization and racialization we find the emergence of
new social movements, activism, and practices of resistance. Protesters
across North America increasingly employ direct action tactics and
activists have built campaigns against forms of securitized and racialized
violence, such as: police killings, the devaluation of black life, the
criminalization of undocumented persons, the racist political platforms of
presidential hopefuls, the environmental racism of the water crisis in
Flint, MI, oil pipelines that threaten indigenous lands and livelihoods,
and the violence of gentrification that is everywhere displacing working
class communities of color from cities around the United States.

This panel takes up questions of security, race and resistance in order to
better understand the contemporary political moment. We contend that
bringing these concepts together may provide a pivotal lens through which
to understand the current conjuncture and the state of activist engagement
and political possibilities today. We ask: how can anthropologists theorize
the contemporary through the intersection of security and race in North
America? What do the contemporary uprisings against racism and police
violence tell us about the state of activism and political futures? What
historical and contemporary evidence(s) do we as anthropologists draw upon
to understand the ways that race, capitalism and resistance are
transforming and being transformed by present day politics?

Potential paper topics may include:

-The rise of populist racism and xenophobia in contemporary US politics

-Successes, failures, or complexities of the Black Lives Matter movement

-Activism against environmental racism

-Analysis of flint Michigan’s water crisis

-Mass Incarceration and struggles against the Prison Industrial Complex

-Racial politics of/in contemporary social movements

-Indigenous struggles for land; resistance against pipelines and/or other
kinds of resource extraction

-The intersection of gentrification, displacement, policing

-Policing and racism

-Racial contours of the suburbanization of poverty

-Settler colonialism’s legacies in contemporary security states

-Struggles against the neoliberalization education, charter schools, cuts
to public education

-The “security turn” in North American cities (defensive architecture,
tough on crime policies, broken window policing, etc.)

-borders as technologies of racial violence

-Racialization of laboring populations in historical and/or contemporary
frames

-Race, violence and the War on Terror

-historical anthropology of racial formation and resistance in North
America

-Racial character of capital accumulation in the North American cities

-Theoretical papers about the dynamics of “racialism capitalism”

-Imperialist projection of the US security state power overseas

-Resistance to gentrification and displacement in urban spaces



Please send 250 word abstracts to [log in to unmask] or
[log in to unmask] by APRIL 7th



Chair: Manissa M Maharawal, CUNY Graduate Center

Organizers: Manissa M Maharawal, CUNY Graduate Center; Zoltán Glück, CUNY
Graduate Center


CfP for American Anthropological Association meeting in Minneapolis, MN,
November 16-20, 2016

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