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Dear colleagues,
Please see the Call for Papers for the proposed panel below at the AAA
Annual Meeting, Chicago - 20-24 November, 2013
Engaging with Publics: Distrust, Risk and Uncertainty
Organizers:
Manpreet K. Janeja (University of Copenhagen)
and
Stine Simonsen Puri (University of Copenhagen)
Publics are often imagined as needing, lacking, distrusting, and unstable.
They are attributed intentions that portend future uncertainties and risks.
The panel aims to contribute to theoretical and methodological debates on
how publics are imagined and engaged with in various contexts. Through such
an endeavor we wish to address how imaginaries of uncertainty are woven
into specific understandings of what constitutes a public. In the panel,
publics are not simply approached as homogenous groups of people but as
modes of comprehending and managing forms of uncertainty such as distrust
and risk. Methodologically, rather than working with the notion of publics
as a given entity, the panel examines how the borders of publics are
created, negotiated, and re-worked.
The panel explores understandings of publics among state, non-state, and
market actors. How are publics classified? How are their needs and
intentions envisioned? How are such visualizations acted upon? And what are
their consequences? Through such questions the panel explores the links
between understandings of publics and imaginaries of uncertainties. It
examines how these links impact on current national and trans-national
engagements with publics and configurations of the future. This can be
through normative regulations and welfare measures geared towards the
attainment of future public goods such as health, safety, accountability,
and happiness. Or it can be through speculative practices geared towards
risk-taking using technologies of calculation generative of robust
information, future growth and prosperity, and the management of threats of
crises. As these constructs of publics flow through varied circuits, they
can spill across domains and feed into public imaginations. Entangled in
such engagements with the uncertainties of publics are multiple definitions
of societies, economies, and polities embedded in varied narratives of
crises, doom, and hope. Approaching the myriad forms of engagements with
publics offers fresh avenues of exploring such modalities.
We invite ethnographic ruminations and cogitations on publics ranging from,
for example, food publics in the UK, betting publics in India, and migrant
publics in the USA to WHO health publics, UNEP environmental publics, and
financial publics of banking and investment institutions. In so doing, our
panel seeks to contribute to debates on re-examining publics as tied to
issues of distrust, risk, and uncertainty across scale.
We welcome abstracts of 250 words, including title, keywords, name of
author(s) and name of institution(s) no later than Monday 8 April.
Please send the abstract to:
Manpreet K. Janeja ([log in to unmask])
and
Stine Simonsen Puri ([log in to unmask])
We look forward to hearing from you.
Best wishes,
Manpreet K. Janeja and Stine Simonsen Puri
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