CFP: AAG 2013 Annual Meeting, Los Angeles, April 9-13

 

Session title: EXPLORING MATERIALISED GOVERNMENTALITIES

“In Foucault’s account, government is inevitably a technical matter. Practices of government rely on an array of more or less formalised and more or less specialised technical devices from car seat-belts and driving codes to dietary regimes; and from economic instruments to psychotherapy.” (Barry, 2001, p. 5)

This session seeks to continue the ongoing and enlarging discussion of materialities as political elements that are discussed and ordered while also exerting political potential through the networks in which they are entangled (e.g., Braun & Whatmore, 2010; Jones et al., 2010). The session is particularly interested in materialising governmentality by exploring how different non-human entities appear in regulatory systems. As the governmentality literature has stressed, government itself takes place ‘at a distance’ (Miller & Rose, 1990), adjusting individual behaviour through the various materialities of social life (Joyce, 2003). Objects are used to regulate social relations of various kinds, but they may also be targets themselves for governmental regulation. Often, at the level of states, they are conceptualised as environmental problems, health risks, public nuisances and are thus governed accordingly. Things like cars, bicycles, alcohol, cigarettes, skateboards, pets are regulated—or thought to be regulated—in a number of ways including licensing, ordinances and the manipulation of the spatial design. The aim of the session is to develop an understanding of materialised governmentality through interrogating insights from various academic fields including cultural and political geography, anthropology, sociology of law, urban studies and other more or less specialist disciplines.

Potential topics for theoretical or empirical papers include, but are not limited to:

• Theoretical analysis of connections between the ‘material’ and ‘governmental’ through interrogation of literatures including actor-network theory, science and technology studies, governmentality, material culture, etc;
• Papers that draw connections between materialised governmentality and more traditional social science concepts such as gender or class;
• Analysis of materialities from the perspective of law;
• Conceptualisation of materialised governmentality as a problematic of ‘the urban’.

The session especially encourages submission of empirical papers that use particular object(s) as a focus and draw an analysis linked to topics raised in this call for papers.

Please submit abstracts of maximum 250 words to session organiser Tauri Tuvikene, Department of Geography, University College London ([log in to unmask]) by 5^th October. Feedback will be given by October 12 the latest.

References

Barry, A. (2001) Political Machines: Governing a Technological Society (London & New York: The Athlone Press).

Braun, B. & Whatmore, S. J. (Eds.) (2010) Political Matter: Technoscience, Democracy, and Public Life (Minneapolis & London: University of Minnesota Press).

Jones, R., Pykett, J. & Whitehead, M. (2010) Governing temptation: Changing behaviour in an age of libertarian paternalism. Progress in Human Geography, 35(4), pp. 483 - 501.

Joyce, P. (2003) The Rule of Freedom: Liberalism and the Modern City (London & New York: Verso).

Miller, P. & Rose, N. (1990) Governing economic life. Economy & Society, 19(1), pp. 1 - 31.