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Call for papers:

Anthropological perspectives on political engagements in 21st century
Europe.

Workshop at the 7th Biennial Conference of the European Association of
Social Anthropologists (EASA) - Copenhagen, August 14th-17th, 2002

At the turn of the millennium much about the state of politics in Europe
is fluid and contested, yet how this transformation affects the everyday
lives of European peoples and the ways social actors experience and
understand the political arena remain largely unexplored. Much of
anthropological theorising on politics in Europe has so far taken the
nation-state as its point of reference. At a time when the nation-state
ceases to be the dominant framework setting political agendas, new forms
of political engagement come to the fore: these are expressed by the
emergence of the ideology of governance and its implementation, the
redefinition of the boundary between Left and Right, new social movements
and political actors (including NGOs and immigrants) and their politics
(for example the politicisation of identity and culture). While most of
the existing studies on Europe have so far tended to address such issues
chiefly from a macro and abstract level, and by treating politics as
existing over and above social relations, various questions remain open.
Among such questions the issue of human agency, the meanings of new
political engagements, and the ways social actors cope and come to terms
with a changing political situation figure prominently. Moving beyond a
vision of politics as a mere set of abstract ideas, this workshop takes on
the challenge posed by the emergence of new political engagements in
Europe, and sets out to offer ethnographic insight into such phenomena. We
encourage submission of proposals for papers with a strong ethnographic
basis that have the potential to reflect critically on the transformations
occurring in the political arena in Europe, and also to contribute to
debates within political anthropology by assessing the political
engagement of the discipline itself.


Convenors:

Davide Peṛ, Ph.D
Migration Research Group (GRM)
Departament de Geografia
Universitat Auṭnoma de Barcelona
08193 Bellaterra (Barcelona), Spain
E-mail: [log in to unmask]

Jaro Stacul, Ph.D
Department of Social Anthropology
University of Cambridge
Free School Lane
Cambridge CB2 3RF, United Kingdom
E-mail: [log in to unmask]


Prospective participants should send proposed abstracts (either printouts
or e-mail attachments) by February 1st, 2002. Proposals should not exceed
200 words, and participants have to be members (or prospective members) of
the European Association of Social Anthropologists (EASA).
Further details at: http://easa.uni-miskolc.hu