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Call for Papers: Panel on “China in Africa and Africa in China: employment relations as border crossing” at the 111th AAA Annual Meeting, San Francisco, CA, November 14-18, 2012

From November 14-18, 2012 the American Anthropological Association will host its Annual Meeting in San Francisco around the theme of “Borders and Crossings”. We believe that the growing attention for China-Africa relations has an important contribution to make within this theme, especially regarding Chinese-African and African-Chinese employment relations. We invite paper proposals that approach cross-cultural employment relations of any constellation and across a broad spectrum of economic activities situated both in Africa and in China. 
Please send your paper proposal including abstract (no more than 250 words), paper title, keywords, affiliation and contact details to [log in to unmask] or [log in to unmask] by March 10 2012. 

We will immediately get back to you. We apologize for the narrow time frame, but full panel proposals have to be submitted to the conference organizers by March 15!

Please do not hesitate to contact us for further details, and please forward this call to your colleagues who might be interested.

Best regards,

Karsten Giese, GIGA Institute of Asian Studies, Hamburg
Alena Thiel, GIGA Institute of African Affairs, Hamburg


Panel Proposal
Borders and Crossings
111th AAA Annual Meeting 
November 14-18, 2012 
San Francisco, CA 

China in Africa and Africa in China: employment relations as border crossing

Chinese-African engagements are receiving increasing attention across academic and more popular publications. The Chinese presence in Africa in particular is notorious for its involvement in economic sectors as diverse as construction and infrastructural development (ODA and profit based), mining, agriculture, manufacturing, services and not least trade. While media reports about Chinese economic activities in Africa in general and with regard to labor conflicts in particular are overabundant, though often of doubtful truth-value, African entrepreneurs in China have received much less public attention. Pioneering African entrepreneurs employing Chinese labor have been sighted in trade, services (especially hotels and restaurants) and manufacturing in several places in China. 
Irrespective of geographic location on the African continent or in China and of economic sector, all these activities share the experience of employment relationships working across differences in the areas of culture, wealth, work ethics (including unwritten rules and behavioral norms, obligations and entitlements), adherence to informal employment practices, codified labor law and international standards, to name only few potential divides. 
In this panel, we seek to understand the ways in which Chinese-African employment relationships in any of the above mentioned constellations do or do not manage to negotiate the borders between minority and majority cultures in the work place. We purposefully invite contributions from the entire spectrum of work experiences related to Chinese economic activities in Africa and African businesses in China. 
We expect questions around the issue of power relations and ideologies related to employment and work to be particularly relevant and defining for the dynamics of reaching across differences in the cross-cultural work place. For example, is the individual effort to translate multiple dimensions of unfamiliarity and adapt to more fundamental differences in the cross-cultural work context of Chinese-African employment shaped by the relative position of authority vested in the figure of the employer? Does the latter create a monopoly over the interpretation of the employment relationship or are the sojourning employers compelled to adapt to pervasive local norms and ideologies due to their status as outsiders? Beyond the issue of power relations, which other reasons motivate actors to cross the limits of their familiar frames of interaction and engage in cross-cultural employment relations? Finally, if figurations in employment across cultural/ethnic borders are not fixed but negotiable, what is the potential of such interactions to transcend more wide-spread social prejudices and resentments? 













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