JOURNAL/CFP - Special Issue of Central Asian Survey: Movement, Power and
Place in and Beyond Central Asia

Abstracts are invited for a Special Issue of Central Asian Survey, due
for publication in the Spring of 2011, on "Movement, Power and Place in
and Beyond Central Asia".  The Call for Papers with details of relevant
submission dates can be found below and on Central Asian Survey
home-page by going to www.informaworld.com/ccas and clicking on the
"call for papers" tab.


Movement, Power and Place in and Beyond Central Asia

Guest editor:  Madeleine Reeves, University of Manchester

Central Asia has been, and continues to be, profoundly constituted by
the movement and circulation of people and things.   Some of these
movements have figured centrally in the imagination of this region as a
site of trade, exchange and cultural mixing:  Central Asia as Silk Road
in miniature.  Other forms of movement - of narcotics, of arms, or of
border-violating militants, by contrast, have played into an opposed,
but no less powerful imagination of Central Asia as a locus
of danger or subject to threat.   Less often explored - and what this
Special Issue seeks to foreground - are the complex dynamics of people
and things on the move, and the ways in which such movements are shaped
by, or become constitutive of, relations of power.  Rather than
analysing "flows" in the abstract, this volume will enquire about the
situated practices, material infrastructures and political relations
through which people, ideas, images and things move or are moved;
cross, and remake boundaries of various kinds.   As such it seeks to
advance our understanding of the intersections between movement, power
and place in and beyond Central Asia, in settings both "exceptional" and
mundane.

This approach invites contributions that engage material from diverse
historical periods and theoretical perspectives.  Abstracts are welcome
from the growing cohort of scholars exploring issues of international,
inter-regional and cross-border migrations in Central Asia.  But the
framing of the Special Issue also encourages engagements with forms of
movement and place-making which, because they are not normally spoken of
as "migrations" or do not involve obvious "border-crossings" are rarely
explored within the same analytic frame: the seasonal movement of
pastoralist herders, for instance; the movement of market traders
between village and town, the circulation of Soviet engineers between
urban construction projects throughout Soviet Central Asia, the movement
of daughters in marriage, or the displacement of families through war,
natural disaster, or
state-led attempts at "modernisation".   Contributions are equally
encouraged that examine the ways in which particular kinds of movement -
and limitations upon movement - figure in the production of social
hierarchies: how authority is spatialised in domestic settings, for
instance; or how new forms of spatial segregation articulate with social
hierarchies in the production of urban space.

The Special Issue does not aim to privilege any particular discipline
and contributions are invited that seek to draw theoretical insight from
the rich detail of empirical research, whether this draw upon
ethnographic, sociological, or archival data.  Such questions might
include, but are not confined to, the following:

*	How might attention to movement allow us to question a
"sedentarist metaphysic" (Malkki) in our analysis of Central Asia - the
tendency to treat culture as "rooted" in place?
*	How are mobilities regulated and policed, formally and
informally? How are mobility and immobility gendered?  How is movement
used to enact (and contest) social hierarchies of various kinds?
*	How did and do particular technologies - such as railways, air
transport, mobile telephones, machine-readable passports, barbed wire
fencing or satellite dishes enable and constrain new forms of practical
and imaginative connection across space?
*	How have places and homes been remade, historically and today,
as a result of new kinds of movement, including exile, labour migration,
the return of co-ethnics to their "historical homeland", or displacement
through war or natural disaster?
*	What do new kinds of movement do for our categorisations of
various kinds of place in Central Asia: as "rural" or "urban";
"traditional" or "modern"; "central" or "marginal"?
*	How might new forms of movement challenge us to (re-) think the
bounds of Central Asia as a world region?

Paper proposals of up to 500 words and a short accompanying biographical
statement should be sent to [log in to unmask] by March 10th 2010.
Selected contributors will be invited to submit a complete paper by
September 15th 2010, which will then be subject to peer review.   Papers
are scheduled to appear in Central Asian Survey in
the spring of 2011.