*** AAA 2017 Call for Papers ***
*** please circulate widely ***
116th AAA Annual Meeting
Wednesday, November 29 - Sunday, December 3, 2017
Rethinking Embodiment, Dispossession, and Resistance from the Notion of "Vulnerability"
organized by Heike Drotbohm (University of Mainz) and Claudia Liebelt (University of Bayreuth)
In the past few years, the notion of vulnerability has become prominent for rethinking the relation between power and the human body in times of crisis. In an age of escalating 'disasters,' vulnerability has become part of the mainstream development jargon 'to identify people particularly in need of interventions' (Bankoff, Frerks, Hilhorst 2004: 2). In contrast, Judith Butler and others recently attempted to rethink vulnerability not as an inability of withstanding the effects of a hostile environment, but as an embodied aspect and element of resistance, of confronting normative orders in times of precarity through and with one's body.
Starting from a critique of vulnerability as passive and gendered female, such a perspective makes visible the act of establishing 'vulnerable' bodies, whether by active force or by categorization and subsequent treatment. Vulnerability operates in a tactical field and may be claimed by both, the regime of power or the disenfranchised - whether labelled as 'illegal immigrants,' the 'disabled,' 'rioters,' 'criminals,' the 'poor,' or victims of domestic violence or trafficking. Vulnerability thus is an integral part of social relations, with important implications for our understandings of embodiment, power, and sociality (Butler, Gambetti and Sabsay 2016). For social movements, such a perspective may form the basis for an approach that does not take for granted the infrastructures for common action, but pays attention to participants' particular needs and mobilizes to affect a sociality based on inclusion.
Such an understanding, we argue is of the utmost importance to anthropology in that it draws attention to the particularities of our bodies and the ways the articulation and recognition of rights is tied to concrete bodily practices and conditions. The recognition of vulnerability and bodily difference may become the starting point for a politics of inclusion (or exclusion), and indeed for ethnographic research itself. In our panel, we seek to discuss the notion of vulnerability to rethink ethnographies of dispossession, resistance and workings through and with the human body. Taking up the theme of the annual meeting to discuss the relationship between anthropology and recent social movements, the papers in our panel focus on people's claims of rights and basic needs in the contexts of structural or state violence, as well as ongoing social and political crises. Drawing from ethnographic material on LGBTQI activism, urban dispossession, migrants and refugees, the representation of disease or disability as well as gendered bodies, our panel will contribute to showing how anthropology, as a vociferous and committed approach to studying the present condition, matters.
Please send abstracts (250 words or less) to Claudia Liebelt, at [log in to unmask], no later than April 11. We look forward to receiving your submissions!
Claudia Liebelt, Dr.phil.
Assistant Professor, Chair for Social Anthropology
Bayreuth University
D-95440 Bayreuth (Germany)
fon: +49 (0)921 - 554115
fax: +49 (0)921 - 554118
Member of the editorial board of Sociologus - Journal for Social Anthropology, http://www.duncker-humblot.de/zeitschriften/wirtschafts-undsozialwissenschaften/sociologus.html
*************************************************************
* 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. *
*
***************************************************************
|