Dear colleagues,
We warmly invite you to submit abstracts for the panel 'Repairing the Periphery', which will be held at the next SIEF conference in Göttingen, 26-30 March 2017.
The call for papers closes on 7 November 2016.
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Convenors
Patrick Laviolette (Tallinn University)
Francisco MartĂnez (Estonian Academy of Arts)
Discussant
Adam Drazin (UCL)
Short Abstract
What is gained from studying repair? This panel deals with how repair influences contemporary social processes in Europe's peripheries by considering it through the experience of individuals, in the context of the societies it produces, attentive to political, infrastructural and world-making links.
Long Abstract
Repair is more than a technique; it also entails responsibility, care and expectations about the future. It brings to light coping mechanisms, temporal regimes, the correspondence between small scale materiality and the pace of social change as well as the transmissions occurring between material objects and social actors. Repair practices enact both vulnerabilities and actual needs, simultaneously reproducing and altering conditions of possibility. A distinct tacit knowledge emerges through repair. Such embodied practice is ingrained within experience change and adaptation. Repair highlights the rather invisible relationships between order/disorder, foregrounding a constant ordering process that makes possible a relative permanence for a given system as a whole.
A focus on 'peripheral repairing' gives voice to the subaltern, framing periphery beyond exclusively spatial considerations. This locates repair at the margins of dominant paradigms.
The following provocations will frame the discussion:
- To conserve anthropologically is more revolutionary than iconoclasm.
- Recovering past things is a common symbolic instruments used in negotiating belonging and adapting to changes (repair thus domesticates broader socio-transformations).
- Material objects and human security are in relationship; the reluctance to dispose of material possessions is deeply rooted.
- Repair practices help to cope with the non-linearity of social life by attaching values of care to things, reconciling different generations and helping community synchronisation.
- The experience of repair entails a capacity for reconciliation, sharing features with ethical and political decisions - material, social and emotional attachment.
- Repair involves subtle shifts in the spatial, temporal, scalar, and material processes which together help constitute social transformations.
In order to propose a paper:
http://www.nomadit.co.uk/sief/sief2017/panels.php5?PanelID=5069&DisplayType=Tree
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