AAA CfP: Illegibility, Ambivalence, and the Political
Anthropologists have documented with increasing precision and insight the ways in which technologies of measurement, identification, and inclusion define certain social subjects as knowable and known, legible and registered, and as objects in need of intervention. Emanating from dispersed sites throughout 'civil society' and transnational networks, as well as traditional locations within the state, these technologies work by idetnifying the characteristics of particular groups, defining the meaning of social problems and conceivable remedies, and so containing the space of the political.
This panel explores instances when subjects exceed or elude strategies of institutional knowledge production and the technologies of exclusion/inclusion and regulation they authorize. Through concrete ethnographic and geographic studies, can we understand uncertainty and ambivalence as a form of the political, rather than a condition of being incompletely or insufficiently 'political'?
We wish to move away from the too-familiar celebrations—and condemnations—of hybridity, multiplicity, and liminality, on the one hand, or fixity, identity, and essence, on the other, that typically attend discussions of what we think of here as illegibility or ambivalence. To identify hybridity as a condition of political possiblity risks minimizing the traumatic injuries or political immobility that may attend or produce ambivalent attachments. Likewise, blanket assertions that "some essentialism is necessary" for politics risk separating a limited space of political authenticity from the complexity of real lives, and so reinscribing the authority of experts and diminishing or silencing those who exceed essentialist boudaries. Sensitive to these risks, this panel turns to concrete ethnographic investigations of illegibility, uncertainty, and ambivalence, keeping in mind that that these may be conditions of injury and abjection as well as possibility, and may attend rooted identities or places as well as fluid or unstable locations. What are the conditions of illegibility? What are the consequences for subjects who trouble or elude institutional modes of knowing, or who reside within or alongside illegible or ambiguous spaces? Finally, what are the politics of anthropological practice in these conditions? What models of collaboration or activism can we imagine to address the terrain of multiple political attachments, ambivalent identifications, and uncertain spaces?
We seek papers addressing a broad range of sites, subjects, and locations, organized around the questions we pose about ambivalence and the political. In order to meet the AAA deadline of April 1, we need to receive abstracts of no more than 250 words by March 20, 2008. Please send abstracts to Brandt Peterson at peter699@msu.edu.
This panel explores instances when subjects exceed or elude strategies of institutional knowledge production and the technologies of exclusion/inclusion and regulation they authorize. Through concrete ethnographic and geographic studies, can we understand uncertainty and ambivalence as a form of the political, rather than a condition of being incompletely or insufficiently 'political'?
We wish to move away from the too-familiar celebrations—and condemnations—of hybridity, multiplicity, and liminality, on the one hand, or fixity, identity, and essence, on the other, that typically attend discussions of what we think of here as illegibility or ambivalence. To identify hybridity as a condition of political possiblity risks minimizing the traumatic injuries or political immobility that may attend or produce ambivalent attachments. Likewise, blanket assertions that "some essentialism is necessary" for politics risk separating a limited space of political authenticity from the complexity of real lives, and so reinscribing the authority of experts and diminishing or silencing those who exceed essentialist boudaries. Sensitive to these risks, this panel turns to concrete ethnographic investigations of illegibility, uncertainty, and ambivalence, keeping in mind that that these may be conditions of injury and abjection as well as possibility, and may attend rooted identities or places as well as fluid or unstable locations. What are the conditions of illegibility? What are the consequences for subjects who trouble or elude institutional modes of knowing, or who reside within or alongside illegible or ambiguous spaces? Finally, what are the politics of anthropological practice in these conditions? What models of collaboration or activism can we imagine to address the terrain of multiple political attachments, ambivalent identifications, and uncertain spaces?
We seek papers addressing a broad range of sites, subjects, and locations, organized around the questions we pose about ambivalence and the political. In order to meet the AAA deadline of April 1, we need to receive abstracts of no more than 250 words by March 20, 2008. Please send abstracts to Brandt Peterson at peter699@msu.edu.
Thursday, February 28, 2008
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