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Dear All,
Please find below the Call for Papers for the workshop "Activism and
Posiibilities of Justice: Anthropological Perspectives" organised by the
EASA "Anthropology and Social Movements" network. This workshop will be
held at University of Perugia on Saturday 26th October 2013. Travel
reimbursement is available for EASA-members.
You are most welcome to propose a paper and/or contribute actively to the
workshop with your ideas.
The deadline to submit an abstract is August, 30th, 2013.
Also, feel free to circulate this call to whom might be interested.
We are looking forward to meet you there.
Best,
The Organizers
ACTIVISM AND POSSIBILITIES OF JUSTICE:
ANTHROPOLOGICAL PERSPECTIVES
Call for Papers
Deadline: 30 August 2013
The unprecedented spread of mass mobilizations throughout the world let
many observers no doubts: something “new” and still “without a
name” is happening, argue distinguished left-wing scholars like Alain
Badiou and Slavoj Žižek. The unexpected “Arab Spring” changed
regional and global Middle Eastern politics, considered as “static” and
out of the way for activism beyond the Islamist movement; the
world-spreading “Occupy” movements have set a new agenda highlighting
the crisis of neoliberal austerity politics. The almost universal reach of
recent popular uprisings has made studying social movements “hotter”
topic than ever, movement scholar Mayer Zald relates. With this
development, themes and visions related to justice and solidarity evolved
rapidly, has been re-interpreted by a diverse set of forces and has moved
back at the forefront of global visibility. In this workshop, we aim to
explore these possibilities of justice. What contributions anthropologists
do make to this effervescent scenario? With their interest in marginal
settings and the world peripheries, which are the “out-of-sight” places
and scenarios worth to have a closer look at? How can anthropologists
relate activism to broader political forces? In this workshop, we aim to
create both a comparative perspective and update and coordinate
interpretative lenses.
The workshop will be articulated in two panels and will be concluded with a
wrap-up round table. The first panel aims to critically map the scenario
with a special focus on “peripheral” uprisings in the South. The second
panel invites papers that offer fresh ethnographically and theoretically
informed insights related to the recent wave of uprisings.
Logistics:
Please submit an abstract (that includes also your academic affiliation and
role) for a paper of about 20 minutes for one of the two proposed panels
(max. 250 words) before August 30th 2013 to
[log in to unmask] The name of the attached document
with the abstract should include your last name.
The registration fee will be 60 Euro and will include accommodation.
EASA-members will receive a reimbursement of their travel expenses up to
250 Euro (in exceptional cases more). The event will take place at
University of Perugia on October 26th, 2013 (central Italy; e.g. airports
“Perugia San Egidio”, Florence, Pisa, or Rome) and lodging will be
organised.
******************
Panel One
UPRISINGS IN A RISING SOUTH: DISPOSSESSION, COLLECTIVE ACTION AND
RESISTANCE IN EMERGING ECONOMIES
Conveners: Kenneth Bo Nielsen (Univ. of Oslo) and Alf Gunvald Nilsen (Univ.
of Bergen)
The vectors of power in the world system are changing: at a time when the
Anglo-American heartlands of capitalism are mired in persistent crisis,
several countries in the South – chief among them Brazil, India, China
and South Africa – currently find themselves at the crest of a wave of
economic growth that, according to the UNDP’s Human Development Report of
2013, is bringing about “a dramatic rebalancing of global economic
power”. Yet, there is ample reason to question the optimistic tenor of
recent Southern growth stories: chronic poverty still blights the lives of
large numbers of the population in these “emerging” countries;
inequality is on the increase, despite the implementation of
“inclusive” social policies; integration into transnational economic
circuits has been accompanied by processes of dispossession and
exploitation. While these are arguably good reasons for why these
“emerging economies” are becoming epicentres of popular resistance in
the global South – from the sweatshops of Chinese export-processing
zones, via the fields and forests of the Indian and Brazilian countryside
to the shantytowns of South Africa’s urban centres – the set of factors
that combine to shape the form and direction that social movements in these
countries take is undoubtedly complex.
This panel sets out to conduct a comparative and critical mapping of this
scenario, by inviting papers that present empirically grounded and
theoretically informed analyses of popular resistance in emerging
economies. The panel addresses such questions as: What are the fulcrums
around which resistance ignites in different countries? What have been the
key characteristics and dynamics of movement processes in the context of
rapid growth and uneven development? How do activists and movement
campaigns relate to regime types and organised politics in different
states? How does the availability of material resources combine with
symbolic and affective registers in concrete processes of collective
mobilisation? And to what extent have social movements become forces that
are capable of changing trajectories of development in the emerging
economies of the global South?
Panel Two
STUDYING ACTIVISM AND THE POSSIBILITIES OF JUSTICE
Conveners: Alexander Koensler (Queen’s Univ. Belfast) and Elena Apostoli
Cappello (Univ. of Padova)
The current waves of uprisings change not only the political scenario, but
urge to rethink as well many theoretical premises of understanding
activism. The objective of the panel is to reflect on the implications of
this dramatic change, for both academic research and political balances. In
light of this, the panel gathers ethnographic, fine-grained analysis of
shifting conditions in which movements are articulated and then to
“update” theoretical approaches. One primary impact of this shift is
the re-emergence of universalist, transversal themes of justice as
contra-posed to the fragmentation and localisation of activism in terms of
“identity”- claiming activism. In anthropological writing on social
movements, a tendency to focus on “culture” and internal dynamics has
been prevalent. Therefore, compared to other fields, such as the
well-established paradigms of social movement analysis in sociology,
anthropological research is characterised by a fragmentation of different
approaches and theoretical lenses when it comes to a systematic
understanding of the relation between activism and conflicts.
In this panel we invite both ethnographically informed and theoretical
contributions that offer fresh interpretative and/or theoretical insights.
This can be developed either related to often overseen or original aspects
of movement analysis (knowledge and claim-making, travelling imaginaries)
or the understanding of activism within its broader field of forces
(conflicts, state power, global scales). The aim of this panel is to
interpret changing interpretative paradigms. We thus ask the following
questions: How can we understand collective action as related to
dispossession, inequality, crisis and conflict? Which theoretical lenses
can be proofed, updated or inverted? How can the intervention of social
movements in relation to other political forces appropriately be assessed?
What sort of political forces are social movements?
Final Round Table
ANTHROPOLOGY, SOCIAL MOVEMENTS AND JUSTICE: NEW INSIGHTS?
Coordinator: Stefano Boni and [TBD]; all participants
For questions:
Elena Apostoli Cappello ([log in to unmask]) or Alex Koensler
([log in to unmask])
++++++
EASA Network “Anthropology and Social Movements”
http://www.easaonline.org/networks/movement
----------------
Dr Alexander Koensler
Research Fellow
Institute for the Study of Conflict Transformation and Social Justice
(ISCTSJ)
Queen's University Belfast
19 University Square
BT7 1NN
Phone: +44 (0) 28 9097 3992 Email: [log in to unmask]
Web: http://www.qub.ac.uk/ISCTSJ
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