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<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align:left"><b><span style="font-family:'Times New Roman'"><br></span></b></p><p class="MsoNormal" align="center" style="text-align:center"><b><span style="font-family:'Times New Roman'"><br></span></b></p><p class="MsoNormal" align="center" style="text-align:center"><b><span style="font-family:'Times New Roman'">CALL FOR PAPERS:</span></b></p><p class="MsoNormal" align="center" style="text-align:center"><b><span style="font-family:'Times New Roman'">The Presentation of Self In
Workaday Life</span></b></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" align="center" style="text-align:center"><span style="font-family:'Times New Roman'">Annual Meeting of the American
Anthropological Association</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" align="center" style="text-align:center"><span style="font-family:'Times New Roman'">November 18-22, 2015</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" align="center" style="text-align:center"><span style="font-family:'Times New Roman'"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" align="center" style="text-align:center"><span style="font-family:'Times New Roman'">Co-Organizers:</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" align="center" style="text-align:center"><span style="font-family:'Times New Roman'">Elizabeth Brummel (University of Chicago)</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" align="center" style="text-align:center"><span style="font-family:'Times New Roman'">Adam Sargent (University of Chicago)</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><b><span style="font-family:'Times New Roman'"> </span></b></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent:0.5in"><span style="font-family:'Times New Roman'">While
economic anthropology has demonstrated the ways in which notions of selves as
economically valuable have become increasingly important around the globe
(Anagnost 2004, Gershon 2011, Salzinger 2003), linguistic anthropology has
developed a robust set of analytical tools for understanding the emergence of
selves in everyday interactions. This panel seeks to draw these approaches to
work and the self into productive dialogue. </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent:0.5in"><span style="font-family:'Times New Roman'">Contemporary
workaday life often requires individuals to perform themselves as ideally
suited to or expert in even the most mundane roles. Specialized registers and
regulations to role inhabitance serve as gatekeeping and knowledge-bounding
technologies that cordon off fields of expertise, produce their experts, and
transform their participants (Mertz 2007, Wortham 2009). In his classic
dramaturgical analysis of interpersonal interaction, Erving Goffman referred to
these registers and models for comportment as “rhetorics of training” capable
of producing professions as much as their practitioners (1959:46). We aim to
push the analyses further by looking at the ways in which infrastructures of
interpersonal interaction not only inform but also constitute work itself.
Drawing inspiration from scholarship on the linkages between language and
political economy (Irvine 1989, Shankar & Cavanaugh 2012), this panel seeks
to explore the linguistic and interactional work of presenting selves as a key
element in economic practice including the generation of new economic
possibilities.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent:0.5in"><span style="font-family:'Times New Roman'">In
neoliberal markets this happens quite explicitly as potential workers are
increasingly encouraged to market themselves to companies as bundles of skills
(Urciuoli 2008). With the overwhelming influence of international development
in Uganda, for example, the performance of particular personae have become
important modes of attracting NGO resources, a new form of productive labor. In
places like Kenya where unemployment is rife, youth perform the persona of
their chosen professions such as counselors or motivational speakers in
everyday interactions, activity that is simultaneously work in itself and a
claim to economic inclusion. Even “traditional” work situations such as
construction sites in India are mediated through the production and negotiation
of particular personae, the “angry boss,” the “skilled carpenter.” All of these
personae not only do interactional work, but also, so this panel argues, make
work itself work. </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent:0.5in"><span style="font-family:'Times New Roman'">We
welcome paper abstracts that explore the ways in which registers and
infrastructures of interaction produce, and make economically effective,
various social personae around the globe.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family:'Times New Roman'"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family:'Times New Roman'"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><b><span style="font-family:'Times New Roman'">Please respond to this call by March 23,
2015 by emailing an abstract of no more than 250 words to:</span></b></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><b><span style="font-family:'Times New Roman'">Elizabeth Brummel (</span><a href="mailto:ebrummel@uchicago.edu"><span style="font-family:'Times New Roman'">ebrummel@uchicago.edu</span></a></b><b><span style="font-family:'Times New Roman'">)
and Adam Sargent (</span><a href="mailto:sargenta@uchicago.edu"><span style="font-family:'Times New Roman'">sargenta@uchicago.edu</span></a></b><b><span style="font-family:'Times New Roman'">) </span></b></p>
<div><br></div>-- <br><div class="gmail_signature"><div dir="ltr"><div>Elizabeth Brummel<br>PhD Candidate<br>Department of Anthropology<br>University of Chicago</div><div>t: 312-459-4199</div><div>e: <a href="mailto:ejbrummel@gmail.com" target="_blank">ejbrummel@gmail.com</a><br><br></div></div></div>
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