CFP - Theorizing (im)mobilities: Anthropological takes on an emerging metanarrative

[Noel B. Salazar]

This is a call for papers for an executive/invited session at the 2009
AAA Annual Meeting.

*** Apologies for cross-posting ***

CALL FOR PAPERS
Theorizing (im)mobilities: Anthropological takes on an emerging
metanarrative
American Anthropological Association Annual Meeting
Philadelphia Marriott, Philadelphia, December 2-6, 2009

Organizer: Dr. Noel B. Salazar (University of Leuven)

Mobility, noun:
(1) ability to move or to be moved;
(2) ease or freedom of movement; and
(3) tendency to change easily or quickly.

It is fashionable to imagine today’s world as being in constant motion,
with people, cultures, goods, money, businesses, diseases, images, and
ideas flowing in every direction across the planet. The scholarly
literature is replete with concepts and metaphors attempting to capture
altered or intensified spatial and temporal realities:
deterritorialization and scapes, time–space compression, the network
society and its space of flows, cosmopolitanism, and the possibility of
leading bi-focal and multi-focal lives in several locations
simultaneously through transnational migration. Sociologists and
geographers enthusiastically talk about the ‘mobility turn’ in the
social sciences, stressing the breaching of boundaries by migration,
mass communication, and trade, and suggesting the emergence of novel
forms of identity, economy, and community. For the self-critical
discipline of anthropology, which has accused itself in the recent past
of representing people as territorially, socially, and culturally
bounded, this perceived new reality is thought to be theoretically and
methodologically challenging.
If mobility is the new mantra to be chanted, the chorus line might be
older than most scholars want to acknowledge. The idea that everything
is in constant motion was already developed by the Greek philosopher
Heraclitus of Ephesus (ca. 540-480 BCE), who became known for his
doctrine that change is central to the universe and that ‘all things
flow’. Long before globalization, transnationalism, or cosmopolitanism
became academic buzzwords, anthropologists already knew about such
mobilities as experience experts (although they not necessarily
acknowledged them in their writings). With the present hype over global
fluxes and flows, we tend to forget that many of anthropology’s founding
scholars, including Franz Boas and Bronislaw Malinowski, were themselves
migrants and that the latter put transcultural mobility at the heart of
ethnographic practice. Not only the experience of “being there” produced
invaluable insights that shaped the discipline, but also the act of
traveling “out of place” played a determining role. At the same time,
critically engaged ethnographers have been among the first to point out
that the very processes that produce global movements and linkages
promote immobility, exclusion, and disconnection.
In line with the 2009 Annual Meeting’s general theme, ‘The End/s of
Anthropology’, this panel aims at discussing the analytical purchase of
(im)mobility as an overarching conceptual framework to study and
understand the current human condition. Individual papers will advance
anthropological theorizing by addressing the following questions: Why
has the distinction between mobilities and immobilities, in their
various forms, gradually become one of the central dichotomies in social
theory (with the former usually being a priori positively valued)? Which
role do conceptualizations of (im)mobility play in anthropological
theories, both today and historically? How are anthropology (as a
discipline) and anthropologists (as ethnographic practitioners)
positioned in relation to issues of (im)mobility? Why is mobility (not)
the next grand narrative in anthropology or the social sciences at large?


If you are interested in participating in this panel, contact Dr. Noel
B. Salazar (noel.salazar at soc.kuleuven.be) by 11 January 2009
(negotiations are underway to have this panel accepted as an executive
or invited session).
Please submit your name, your affiliation, a title, and an abstract
limited to 250 words. High-quality papers will be selected for
publication in an edited volume.
More information about the conference in general will soon be available
online:
http://www.aaanet.org/meetings/


Dr. Noel B. SALAZAR obtained his PhD from the Department of Anthropology
at the University of Pennsylvania (USA). He is currently a Postdoctoral
Fellow at the Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Leuven (Belgium)
and a Visiting Research Associate at the Centre for Tourism and Cultural
Change, Leeds Metropolitan University (UK). His research interests
include anthropologies of mobility, the local-to-global nexus,
discourses and imaginaries of Otherness, culture brokering and contact,
and public interest ethnographies. More information about his projects
and publications is available online:
http://kuleuven.academia.edu/NoelBSalazar
-- 
////\\\\////\\\\////\\\\////\\\\////\\\\////\\\\////\\\\////\\\\////\\\\////
Noel B. Salazar, PhD
Marie Curie Fellow (EC, FP7-PEOPLE-IRG)
Fellow of the Research Foundation - Flanders (FWO)
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
IMMRC, Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Leuven
Parkstraat 45 (AV 03.06), bus 3615, B-3000 Leuven, Belgium
Tel: +32 (0)475 53.73.13, Fax +32 (0)16 32.59.02
http://kuleuven.academia.edu/NoelBSalazar
////\\\\////\\\\////\\\\////\\\\////\\\\////\\\\////\\\\////\\\\////\\\\////