Apologies for cross-posting.
CFP for the CASID (Canadian Association for the Study of International
Development) Conference, University of Saskatchewan, May 31-June 2, 2007
Topic: Social Capital, Class and Neoliberalism
The popularity of the social-capital concept in development studies, geography
and other cognate disciplines partly reflects the growing realization among
scholars that economic processes are embedded in social relations. Perhaps more
importantly, it also reflects the current worldwide neoliberal agenda promoted
by major capitalist agencies such as the World Bank. In particular,
social-capital research, which, not unsurprisingly, receives an immense amount
of support from the World Bank, fits in well with the neoliberal agenda of
making (imperfect) markets more efficient by emphasizing how non-market
processes such as the state, trust and customs grease the wheels of market.
This research also serves neoliberalism by stressing how poor people can
‘bootstrap’ themselves up by using informal (place-based) relations of
reciprocity in their communities and/or with some help from NGOs and
poor-friendly agents in the state apparatus without the poor having to
challenge the power relations of (neoliberal) capitalism. Underneath the
popularity of the social-capital literature there are several major problems,
however. One of this is that the literature tends to under-stress (and often
ignore) the class character of social capital. More particularly, it
under-stresses the class-defined contexts within which social capital is
produced and which severely constrain any potential positive effects of social
capital. Papers in the session will investigate the class-silencing of the
social capital project and its complicity in the reproduction of neoliberalism
as a major material-discursive project of ‘creative destruction’ (Harvey, 2006)
in contemporary global capitalism.
Please send me your queries and/or paper-abstracts of no more than 300 words by
January 23 2007 at [log in to unmask]
Raju
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Raju J Das
Associate Professor
Department of Geography
York University
S404 Ross Building
4700 Keele St.
Toronto, ON Canada M3J 1P3
Tel: 1-416-736-2100 (ext: 22450)
Fax: 1-416-736-5988
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