AAA 2010 CFP: Protest Publics and Transnational Activism

[Kitana Ananda]

**Please distribute widely**

Call for Papers
Panel for 2010 American Anthropological Association meetings, New Orleans,
November 17-21
Organizer: Kitana Ananda (Columbia University)

*Panel title: “Protest Publics and Transnational Activism”*

*If interested, please submit a paper title, abstract of no more than 250
words, affiliation, and contact information to Kitana Ananda,
ksa2103 at columbia.edu, by March 25, 2010. Participants will be notified of
acceptance by March 27, 2010 and are expected to register with the panel for
the AAA’s April 1st deadline.

*Preliminary abstract:*
>From carnivalesque anti-war rallies to bureaucratic petitions, and grave
human rights testimonies to eloquent, impassioned oratory, popular politics
has become a fruitful area of ethnographic inquiry in the contemporary
moment. In the wake of “resistance studies” (cf. Abu-Lughod 1990, Ortner
1995) and amid ongoing concerns with the semiotic and cultural logics of
late capitalism (Ong 1999, Appadurai 1996) anthropologists have carefully
situated social and political movements in formations of modern power.
However, as new modalities and movements emerge from the transformations of
global capital, activists coordinate everyday struggles in increasingly
transnational practices online, in media and on the street. This panel takes
these public cultures of activism as its primary site of inquiry to examine
how people protest injustice, articulate grievances and perform collective
agency.

Protests rely on the movement of people and their bodies, ideas, discourses,
objects, and repertoires of action. Yet a study of their circulation does
not simply highlight mobility. Rather, as anthropologists Benjamin Lee and
Edward LiPuma write, circulation is “a cultural process with its own forms
of abstraction, evaluation, and constraint, which are created by the
interactions between specific types of circulating forms and the
interpretive communities built around them” (2002: 192). Drawing on Lee and
LiPuma’s signal contribution to the study of circulation, this panel
examines the “cultures of circulation” created and animated by transnational
activism and protest. Papers will examine how people interact with the
cultural and political forms that circulate through activist networks and
protest movements, and thus enact new subjectivities, imaginaries and social
practices in the worlds they seek to transform. In doing so, panel members
will also explore how activists, protesters and dissenters inhabit and
negotiate legal and extra-juridical forms of social control in the everyday
life of protest. Even as they make claims that seek to transcend a
particular nation-state or border, activists are embedded within these
social relations. In using a transnational frame, we welcome contributions
that analyze how activisms are constituted in the uneven linkages and
relationships between sites of protest. Papers may also examine how a
specific protest or action is located in transnational public space, time
and communication.

We invite participants to consider the following questions: When and how are
protests mobilized in different locations; what is transnational about these
practices? How does activity provide people with the experience of
transnational space without crossing a border? How do material technologies
of public communication and practices of activism mediate social relations
between participants within and across these sites? What interpretive
communities do these circulations presuppose, and what culturalist
assumptions might they share in relation to the modern state? How do
activists and protesters imagine relations of solidarity with others? How do
they negotiate anxieties of difference and distance? What are the
architectonics of spaces of protest, and how do activists define and deploy
the borders, frontiers, and margins that create rural, urban/suburban,
national, regional and/or transnational movements? What is the temporality
of activist circulation; what pasts and futures do these activisms imagine
and attempt to enact?

Papers may also address the social practice, politics and intersection of
any of the following: diaspora mobilization, nationalism, citizenship,
kinship; new social movements (e.g. feminist, queer, environmental, human
rights, health, labor); cultural or language revitalization; migration,
immigration, asylum-seeking; piety, religious revival and secularism;
independent activist and community media, anti-globalization,
peace/anti-war, international solidarity movements; dissent;
counter-protests.

For more information about requirements and the AAA call for papers, see
http://www.aaanet.org/meetings/Call-for-Papers.cfm