Dear colleagues,
We welcome proposals for our panel for the 2018 American Anthropological
Association (AAA) meeting from Nov 14-18, in San José, California.
Please help us circulate this CFP widely, many thanks!
*Panel Title:*
Pending Politics: Ethnographies of Urban Futures
*Panel Abstract:*
The current rise of authoritarian and protectionist politics at a national
and global scale presents a challenge to the democratic potential of the
city and city-dwellers. In our various urban field sites, what could be
termed a crisis - political, economic, social, personal - is also lived by
city officials, publics, and prisoners as it reverberates through their
lives, destabilizing the dreamworlds and material futures of urban
citizens. But even within this figure of crisis, there exists an everyday
practice and politics of producing hope from darkness. Ethnography allows
us to locate these hopeful and deviant manifestations of becoming amidst
the wreckage of broken municipal promises, postponed urban plans and
policies, and government strategies to fix, stabilize, and secure the city.
This panel aims to explore both the tensions and possibilities between
everyday practices of future-making and state strategies of temporal and
spatial administration. Theories of futurity often limit themselves to the
temporal. By theorizing the city’s "pending politics", we aim to
territorialize the future, incorporating spatiality into investigations of
the *not-yet*, the imminent, the emergent. That is, we propose to explore
the production, (re)distribution, and (re)signification of futures as a
central and contested feature of urban politics and city-making. Cities
across the world often hold the promise of both radical transformation and
quotidian projects of mobility and change. But they are also sites of
waiting, delays, bottlenecks, and detours. In that sense, democratic
becoming and the hopes attached to democratizing politics may foreclose
possibilities even as it works to open them. High hopes and broken promises
may discipline subjects, shape their aspirations, or instigate them to
revolt. We seek to examine the varied forms by which the future stakes a
claim on the present, and to consider how a forward-facing politics shapes
the fabric of cities around the globe.
Through this focus on the future’s immanence within the urban fabric, we
ask: How are hopes, expectations, and deferrals enveloped within programs
of urban governance, and how do they exceed these programs? What new
futures emerge in contexts of urban violence and precarity? What kinds of
breaks and continuities are made possible as ruptures or returns, detours
or redemptions, in the context of urban change? What pasts haunt these
futures? How is the future depleted or renewed as a resource for
administering and/or transforming the present?
*Call for Papers:*
For those interested in participating in the panel, please send a title for
your paper and a 250-word abstract to Nicole Rosner ([log in to unmask]),
Lana Salman ([log in to unmask]) and David Thompson (
[log in to unmask]) no later than *Sunday, April 1*.
Complete information about the AAA Meetings, including roles and
guidelines, can be found here:
http://www.americananthro.org/AttendEvents/landing.aspx?ItemNumber=14722&navItemNumber=566
Best,
Nicole
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