*** AAA 2017 Call for Papers ***
*** please circulate widely ***
*"Intimate Re(gu)lations"*
*Organized by Devin Flaherty, Abigail Mack, and Christopher Stephan
(University of California, Los Angeles)*
As anthropologists, we encounter intimacy in many forms. We find ourselves
woven within and witnessing intimate relationships, varieties of personal
experience, and ways of knowing. Our discipline brings us to these
intimacies with the recognition that they are organized, patterned, and
often structured by forms of power. For instance dying and grieving,
psychological crises, senses of place and belonging, to name a few
[re-write once panel formed]—are in certain sociocultural contexts thrust
into relationship with regulatory bodies, systems, and infrastructures. In
this panel, we explore highly specific configurations of intimacy and
regulation with the aim of bringing to light both how intimate experiences
unfold through, and also in spite of, systematic regulations, and yet also
how certain kinds of regulations are themselves created precisely in order
to respond to, shape, constrain, and —at times—support, intimate
experiences. By setting our sites on a tension between the intimate and the
regular, we self-consciously cast long-standing dualities within
anthropology in a new framework. Both responding to and seeking to further
classic problematics framed within such oppositions as agency and
structure, the individual and culture, public and private, and deviance and
normality, this panel offers intimacy and regulation as a lens through
which to further inquiry into how the shared social world is lived by
singular individuals as they undergo experiences in their lives that are,
from a societal perspective, predictable, typical and systematizable.
In this panel we propose an examination of these themes through close
attention to human experience. It is at this level that many critical
dependencies and disparities between the intimate and the regulated emerge.
For instance, typicality and anonymity are necessary to regulatory
processes. And in one or another form, regulation mediates the shared
social world. And yet, we are also acutely aware of how this contrasts with
individual lives as lived, through which, from the first person
perspective, experiences can never be reduced to just another token of a
type, instead enveloping us in their immediacy and their singular import.
Together, this panel serves as a meditation on the forms of intimate
experience unfolding in regulated spaces and during regulated times in the
contemporary moment. Implicit in the collection of papers is an
interrogation of why regulation has been drawn to these experiences in
particular: what social, cultural, and existential work is getting done by
regulating death, psychiatric episodes, etc.? In what senses do intimate
experiences matter to various regulatory bodies and institutions? How do
regulatory frameworks allow or even catalyze intimate experiences? In
addressing these questions, the papers in this panel seek neither to
champion the perspective of the intimate over regulation nor to wash over
the ways in which the two may be at times antagonistic, but instead to
begin from their interrelation as lived. In doing so, we foreground the
intersubjective as the locus of all social life, be it intimate, regulated,
or, in the cases described in these papers, both.
Please send abstracts (250 words or less) to Devin Flaherty, at
[log in to unmask], no later than April 7. We look forward to
reading your submissions!
--------------------------
Devin Flaherty, MA
Doctoral Candidate
Department of Anthropology
University of California, Los Angeles
*************************************************************
* Anthropology-Matters Mailing List
* http://www.anthropologymatters.com *
* A postgraduate project comprising online journal, *
* online discussions, teaching and research resources *
* and international contacts directory. *
* To join this list or to look at the archived previous *
* messages visit: *
* http://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/lists/Anthropology-Matters.HTML *
* If you have ALREADY subscribed: to send a message to all *
* those currently subscribed to the list,just send mail to: *
* [log in to unmask] *
* *
* Enjoyed the mailing list? Why not join the new *
* CONTACTS SECTION @ www.anthropologymatters.com *
* an international directory of anthropology researchers
*
* To unsubscribe: please log on to jiscmail.ac.uk, and *
* go to the 'Subscriber's corner' page. *
*
***************************************************************
|