** reminder ** deadline March 28, 2016 ** apologies for cross-posting **
CfP: Horizons of an Otherwise: engaging and ‘evidencing’ the politics of the re*
15th AAA Annual Meeting, “Evidence, Accident, Discovery”
November 16-20 2016, Minneapolis
Organizers:
Laura McTighe, Columbia University
Megan Raschig, University of Amsterdam
Discussant: Prof. Deborah A. Thomas, University of Pennsylvania
Chair: Prof. Lisa Stevenson, McGill University
ABSTRACT:
What is the horizon of struggle? What possibilities fill our seemingly dystopic political present? Where do we find them? How do we speak them? How do they speak to us? At the impasse of the ‘end of history’, among the picked-over bones of liberal democratic humanism, the need to reconsider what might constitute ‘the political’ resounds across critical anthropological theory. A generation of scholars has pressed us to realize and dramatically reconceptualize how liberal tropes are smuggled into our analyses of grassroots political engagements -- through habituated conceptual proclivities towards heroic individualism, or latent teleological expectations of progress, or unchecked humanist tendencies towards abstractions like justice or dignity. They propose a range of re* approaches instead: reparative thinking, reckoning-with, reconfigured reciprocity, even responsivity, or recursivity.
And yet we are still left with a fundamental question: So, now what? What does it look like to take steps through this impasse? To not simply call for a reconfiguration, but to actually reconfigure? To not just make a case for reparations, but to actually repair? We contend that this work is already unfolding on the ground in ways that are not only unrecognizable or “undiscoverable” through our latent liberal lenses and methods, but also at times illegible, among populations whose moral purchase on ‘political subjectivity’ is often already discursively foreclosed. The challenge before anthropologists today is to dwell in these becomings alongside, to resist the urge to name a telos that might never be, and to invite the sort of ethnographic sincerity that opens ourselves up to being transformed, or haunted, in the process. When our ‘informants’ are also our colleagues, comrades, and sisters and brothers, how are we called to reach into that re*, and what does this capacitate in our analyses?
In this panel, we aim to articulate the pacings and spacings of politics across diverse fieldsites, with particular attention to generative relationalities between ‘political subjects’ broadly writ. Our concerns are sustained along two intertwined lines of inquiry: What formations and horizons is political action taking, generating, growing? And through what relations of re* are we called to dwell in these impasses, bringing about an otherwise alongside? What conversations can we initiate from this tension, between reflecting on our post-political objects of study and refracting our methods and analyses of engagement? In what kind of language is “evidence” of the transformative capacities of these social projects speaking to us, and thereby rendered legible, “discoverable”? At grassroots sites of contestation or accommodation, among fledgling movements for change at multiple metaphysical scales, or less spectacular projects of endurance or survival, what heterologies take shelter in liberalism? How do liberal political vernaculars of, say, rights or revolution or resistance give rise to processes and conditions that exceed their frames? From these engagements with emergence and the something-more, how do we cultivate new ethnographic methods and modalities for perceiving and addressing formations of a political otherwise?
We invite critical papers and conversations that recenter the responsibility to “reckon” with these emergent political formations and the stakes that implicate us all, mixing the analytical with the methodological in creative, responsive, and reflexive ways. Please send your 250 word abstract and title for your contribution to Megan Raschig ([log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]>) and Laura McTighe ([log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]>) by Monday, March 28.
----
Megan S. Raschig
PhD Candidate in Cultural Anthropology
Universiteit van Amsterdam
Nieuwe Achtergracht 166 C5.10
+31 (0) 6 81 33 65 91
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