AAA 2011 - Call for papers

[Val Pagliai]

Dear colleagues,

Jennifer Reynolds and I are putting together a panel for the AAA, focusing on 
differring narratives about places of migration/encounter. See the abstract 
below. We are looking for a few more panelists, so if you are interested, drop 
me a line.  


AAA 2011
Call for Papers
 
Temporary title: 

Traces of encounters in narratives of place and migration
 
 
This panel welcomes papers focusing on narratives telling about migration and 
places, where the narratives trace political economic histories of rootedness 
and movement, locality, and migration on the landscape (be it a city, village, 
or industrial landscape).
Narratives retell and interpret the ways in which political economies shape 
people’s social networks and life trajectories, in such way that those political 
economies become part of the felt experience of the persons. This is a process 
of sense making where personal life history merges with the political economy of 
the place. Thus, narratives are a looking glass that allows zooming out to 
socio-economic-political history of a place. Or, on the other hand, they allow 
zooming in toward a reworking of the self. 

Narratives display complex understandings of citizenship, belonging, and senses 
of place. They trace the layers of meaning on the landscape, the social networks 
interrelated on the ground, hiding and revealing the multiple liaisons between 
“locals” and migrants. They construct memories, ways of remembering, 
chronotopes.
Narrated places have sides: political sides, the side of the “migrants,” the 
side of the “locals” that take shape in the contrast on each other.
 Narratives are reflexive spaces of action where people struggle with beliefs 
and convictions, define and perceive problems and accounts for problem solving 
strategies. Thus narratives reveal as well as influence how people think 
perceived problems could or should be solved. They reflect on strategies, 
including linguistic strategies, of persuasion and conflict resolution, 
recontextualizing prior speech events where language was used to persuade 
people.
As they narrate, people shift their footing around their stories, the characters 
in them. As they talk about migrant Selves or Others, these shifts reveal 
complex socio-political-economic allegiances. People reveal conflicts between 
what they should be thinking, what they think, what they feel. Narrators 
position themselves as agents or ageless, and at the same time, they position 
their audience, including the anthropologist. As such, narratives represent 
constraints and enable agency. 



Best,

 
Valentina Pagliai

Department of Anthropology
American University
Washington, DC 20016

 Phone# (908) 668-4840  (h)
            


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