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Constituting Risk and Enacting Responsibility in Agrarian Environments 

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Constituting Risk and Enacting Responsibility in Agrarian Environments 

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Bringing together scholarship on risk and uncertainty with work on agrarian  transformations, this panel asks how historical and emerging forms of risk are engaged - understood, mitigated, managed - in agrarian environments. Decades of scholarship has traced the degradation of rural livelihoods and landscapes as a result of state policies that have led to mass indebtedness, ecological degradation, and land dispossession, yet few have considered how everyday actors understand and articulate what it means to be ‘at risk’ - and who must bear responsibility for redress. While everyday risks have always permeated the life-worlds of rural communities across the world and particularly in the global south, the increase in extreme weather events, depleted waterscapes, and market volatility have only exacerbated the already existing precarity of agrarian livelihoods and landscapes. At the same time, we notice a proliferation of policies and programs that seek to address these forms of uncertainty in different ways, from climate adaptation programs to disaster relief measures and price support schemes. These historical and emerging modes of agricultural risk management emerge from and engender novel modes and avenues of governance, accumulation, and claim-making for rural communities, states, corporations, and developmental institutions.

We seek to interrogate how various mechanisms for mitigating risk for rural livelihoods are implemented, managed, and practiced under conditions of late capitalism and the Anthropocene.

Rather than presume what ‘risk’ is, we seek to examine how risk is constituted and imagined by differently and unequally situated actors who collectively co-constitute and contest what it means to be at risk, and thus, worthy of social protection and infrastructural provisioning to buffer against it. By interrogating processes of becoming ‘at risk,’ we simultaneously highlight responsibility as an analytical lens into the precarious present. We ask:

How is risk imagined and articulated?

How do people cHow do people constitute themselves as populations ‘at risk’ and therefore deserving of care and welfare?

What work of translation, performance, and translation are required in these interactions?

How are categories of ‘riskiness’ formed and reformed in everyday discourse and interaction?

To whom is blame and responsibility assigned, and how is this articulated? What forms of redistribution do these conditions produce (or not), and with what effects?

Finally, how do emerging forms of risk reshape relations of obligation and responsibility between states and rural communities?

Through these questions, we seek to ethnographically analyze political and moral economies of risk and responsibility emerging across precarious rural environments.

We are looking for papers that address these questions in different geographical sites and through a range of ethnographic methods. Some possible themes include (but are not limited to): ‘climate smart’ agricultural initiatives, rural employment schemes, price support mechanisms, insurance programs, agricultural extension programs, disaster relief measures, infrastructures of mitigation.

Please submit abstracts by April 15th to Hannah Carlan (hannahcarlan@ucla.edu) or Tanya Matthan (tanyamatthan@ucla.edu).

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CFP for AAA 2020

Organizers:  Keith Murphy, University of California, Irvine

& Llerena Searle, University of Rochester

Panel Abstract:

There is a crypto-class of people — we can call them world-builders — tasked with giving literal shape and form to lived reality. Of course it’s fair to say that everyone participates in various activities that contribute to shaping social reality, but world-builders are different. These are people who explicitly and with intention contemplate, manipulate, and attempt to transform the physical conditions large and small within which other people live. Some world-builders, like city planners and architects, work at grand scales, attempting to create massive environments for people and non-humans to inhabit together. Others work at a slighter scale, like interior designers bringing beauty to domestic spaces, or artists who make pieces to jolt a viewer’s basic sense of the everyday world itself. What’s often central to almost all kinds of world-building is a compulsion to forge links between spaces and times as an explicit strategy for indexically establishing a sense of continuity, as when “old” architectural styles are reimagined in new buildings, or when “the city of the future” is planned and developed to address the specific political-economic circumstances of the present.

This panel is designed to explore the crypto-class of world-builders and the worlds they help build. It brings ethnographic attention to world-builders as practitioners engaged in navigating and shaping political, ethical, and social realities. We examine how a care for objects that world-builders show reflects their own projects of self-fashioning, and how, in expressing that care, they navigate various ethical, professional, and political claims and responsibilities. We see these world-building practices as generating and giving life to situated chronotopes, representations of time, place, and personhood or possible worlds through which world-builders create and act, and within which the people they build for are placed — sometimes figuratively, sometimes quite literally. Attending to chronotopes of world-building — including professional formations like design, architecture, planning, and art, but also others! —  we tease out stances these builders take in relation to others, past and present. Many of these world-building formations, like design, are often conceived of as future-oriented: practitioners envisioning possible futures in paper, ink, or pixels, hoping to shape objects and users later.  In this panel, we also consider the ways in which world-builders reference and circulate visions of the past, and how nostalgia and other stances towards past objects, practices, and people inform their wider projects in the present and future.

Please submit abstracts of no more than 250 words, together with your name, title, institutional affiliation, and email address by March 25 th to

Llerena Searle llerena.searle@rochester.edu
OR

Keith Murphy
kmmurphy@uci.edu

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Promiscuous Signs: Place-Making and Social Memory in Post-Colonial/Post-Conflict Cities

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Promiscuous Signs: Place-Making and Social Memory in Post-Colonial/Post-Conflict Cities

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Organizers:

Kristin Gee Hickman, University of Mississippi

Stephanie V. Love, City University of New York (CUNY), The Graduate Center

Panel Abstract:

Literature on the relationship between place-making and social memory in post-colonial, post-conflict urban spaces tends to home in on one particular event or moment of violence, which seeps into and animates social relations, spatial formations, and identity in the present.  Certain events of originary violence—whether the dispossession of land, a massacre, a revolutionary or civil war, etc.—become tropes or prisms through which anthropologists and local informants alike process and interpret everyday life and social relations (Huyssen 2003).

Yet recent work in both urban anthropology and archaeology have focused on how urban imaginaries come to be shaped by paradoxical and competing memory work, in which complex temporal layerings and composite overlapping pasts become materially embedded in urban landscapes (Munn 2013). Social actors, in turn, must creatively (albeit unpredictably) draw on material and palimpsestic signs of various pasts to negotiate fraught presents and potential futures, including fears over the inevitable ‘return to violence’ (Nucho 2016). This urban memory work can play out in contested place-naming and cartography (Azaryahu 1996; Massad 2006); archaeology that excavates alternative pasts to justify present and future territorial control (Abu El-Haj 2001); public photo exhibitions of desaparesidos in South America that get framed in terms of the Holocaust (Huyssen 2003); urban politics of despair and senses of loss that reach beyond a single event (Oushakine 2009); among other contested urban place-making and memory practices.

In this panel, we seek to re-examine how post-colonial, post-conflict place-making and interpersonal identity formation draw on and unevenly pull together a multiplicity of signs of violence and pasts. By doing so, we hope to open up the possibility of seeing signs in and of the present not only as indexical of one originary moment, but rather consider the way that urban space “excessively gathers stories, memories, and feelings” and “releases them with a promiscuous indexicality” (Gray 2011).

We particularly encourage papers from a variety of regional focuses that cover topics such as:

Various semiotic processes which engender complex temporalities in urban spaces

Complex and/or paradoxical signs of violence that recruit people into particular and paradoxical urban imaginaries

The materiality of urban landscapes which do specific types of memory work

Memories of violence or other problematic pasts which (dis)orient people in and mitigate how people move through urban landscapes

We welcome papers with diverse regional foci that speak broadly to these themes. Please submit abstracts of no more than 250 words, together with your name, title, institutional affiliation, and email address to Stephanie Love (slove@gradcenter.cuny.edu) and Kristin Hickman (kghickma@olemiss.edu) by Monday, March 23rd.

Works Cited:

Abu El-Haj, Nadia. Facts on the Ground: Archaeological Practice and Territorial Self-Fashioning in Israeli Society. Chicago: IL: University of Chicago Press, 2001.

Azaryahu, Maoz. “The Power of Commemorative Street Names.” Enivornment and Planning D: Society and Space14 (1996): 311–30.

Gray, Lila Ellen. "Fado's City." Anthropology and Humanism36, no. 2 (2011): 141-163.

Huyssen, Andreas. Present Past: Cultural Memory in the Present. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003.

Massad, Joseph A. “The ‘Post-Colonial’ Colony: Time, Space, and Bodies in Palestine/Israel.” InThe Persistence of the Palestinian Question: Essays on Zionism and the Palestinians, 13–40. New York: Routledge, 2006.

Munn, Nancy D. “The ‘Becoming-Past’ of Places: Spacetime and Memory in Nineteenth-Century, Pre-Civil War New York.” HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 3, no. 2 (2013): 359–80.

Nucho, J. R. “All That Endures from Past to Present.” In Everyday Sectarianism in Urban Lebanon: Infrastructures, Public Services, and Power. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016.

Oushakine, S. A. The Patriotism of Despair: Nation, War, and Loss in Russia. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2009.

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This panel concerns the reflexive uptake of mediation as a politically or socially charged act. We define mediation broadly as the action of any third party in producing a relationship between two entities, held to be distinct, and take as given that mediation is a constitutive, unavoidable phenomenon in social/material life. In particular, we examine attempts to erase mediators in the service of truth, fidelity, objectivity, authentic voice and other presumed goods, for example, in attempts to faithfully translate academic scientific findings into contexts of practice in American education. What are the consequences of political vision becoming trained upon mediation as a problem or solution? How do ideologies of mediation come to themselves mediate particular forms of social/political organization, and vice versa? In what contexts is mediation valued and when is it derided? How does mediation become a site of ethics, and what animates ethical debates around mediation?

This panel seeks to examine mediation in any form or modality, from documents and videos, to translators and interpreters, to political events and speeches, and so on. We consider ideologies of mediation across various political contexts, from the role of sign language interpreters in the political representation of deaf people in Vietnam to the role of research intermediaries in implementing academic educational interventions in the US.

Discussant
Laura Kunreuther (Bard College)

Organizers
Lily Ye and Aron Marie (University of Chicago)

Please send abstracts of no more than 250 words to lilyye@uchicago.edu and aronmarie@uchicago.edu by Monday, March 23.