We are seeking abstracts for a potential panel for the 2015 AAA conference in Denver, CO. Below is the call for papers. Please kindly circulate widely.

CFP: States of Precarity, States of Exception: Transnational Imaginaries of Risk

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, “precarity” is defined as a state of being “not securely held or in position; dangerously likely to fall or collapse;” as well as a state of “dependence on chance or uncertainty.” The panel organizers invite abstracts for papers that ethnographically examine how precarity operates as a signifier, mode of accounting, or a narrativization practice. In many contexts, precarity is a trope that is used in various political mobilizations and discourses, humanitarian initiatives, in order to gesture to that which is considered to be on the verge or on the edge of being realized into a particular telos. Projects that center on reinvention, restoration, rehabilitation, rehumanization, or reunification of different kinds are often given weight, urgency, and significance through emphasis on their precarity vis-a-vis other paradigms and “realized” projects. Accompanying mobilizations of precarity is the idea of the state of exception, in both Agamben’s usage and beyond (2005). In this panel, we hope to create a conversation in which we trace the imaginative geographies and transnational circulations through which epistemologies and ontologies of precarity converge with states of exception. The overarching question of this panel seeks to explore the moral valuations, depoliticizations, and modes of narrativization that teleological projects impart, as well as how the risks they project rely on ambiguity, hypotheticals, and endangered potentiality.

Please send all submissions to Baird Campbell ([log in to unmask]) and Helena Zeweri ([log in to unmask]) by Wednesday, April 1st. Submissions should be no more than 250 words and should include a title and keywords. All accepted panelists will need to register for the AAA 2015 conference by or before April 15th.