CFP: AAA panel: Figuring Expert and Everyday Economies: Representations/Interventions

[Adam Leeds]

Figuring Expert and Everyday Economies: Representations/Interventions


 It is one of the ironies of modern mainstream economic thought that while
"the economy," as we have learned to call it, is supposed to be guided by
an "invisible" hand, efforts to know it -- and therefore to participate in
producing it -- have proliferated a variety of often (but not always)
visual means for representing it: charts, graphs, tables, diagrams, data
visualizations, maps, models, equations, indices, and accounts. The visual
is not the only medium for representing the economy, of course, and as
scholars as diverse as Louis Dumont and Michel Callon have argued, such
practices join with the discursive in repertoires of economic expertise to
intervene in the worlds they purport to describe. This is true, David
Ruccio points out, of everyday "popular" economic representations as well,
which offer a variety of alternative or complementary modes of
understanding economic experience otherwise and which often mediate (or
blur) the boundaries between the economic and the ethical, political, and
social. This panel invites explorations of the diverse ways, expert and
everyday, present and past, by which "the economy" has been figured -- that
is, rendered visible, trackable, manipulable, and comprehendible.


 Economic facts--whether of expertise or everyday experience--are not
givens, but take shape through tools, technologies, expert and everyday
knowledges, bureaucratic and institutional arrangements. They may become
"immutable mobiles" and travel across contexts. Yet such figurings also act
back on the processes and assemblages that constituted them. Recent work on
the "performativity" of economic knowledge highlights the agency of such
objects and describes the ways they contribute to the economy's ostensibly
commensensical reality. At the same time, economic
representations/interventions consign to invisibility those aspects of
sociality they omit or devalue. In some cases, the boundary between visible
and invisible itself becomes a target of representation and intervention,
of diverse further figurings that seek to dislodge or disrupt normative
and/or hegemonic visions in the service of personal and political
transformative projects. This panel examines such processes of figuring the
economy, the modes of representation stabilized within them, and the ways
economic representations are always also interventions.

We invite proposals for papers that treat any aspect of this play of
visibility and invisiblity, representing and intervening, with respect to
"the economy" and its related categories of thought and action. Papers
could confront the following questions, among others:


 --How is "the economy" figured in expert, state, corporate, and other
authoritative settings? What charts, graphs, diagrams, and other media
encode these figurings?

--How are different representations of "the economy" made generalizable and
applicable across contexts? What are the tools and practices deployed to do
the work of generalization? To what ends?

--What role do economic concepts such as "work" or "value" play in expert
renderings "the economy?" How are such concepts made visible/invisible?

--What is the relationship between popular and expert renderings of the
economy? What conceptual, analytical, and political work do popular
representations of the economy do?

--What kinds of political projects emerge at the boundaries between popular
and expert economic representations and interventions?

--How do figurings of the economy become objects of affective engagement,
sites at which fears and hopes for self and collective are manifested?

--How does recognition of the performativity of economic representation
change the work of anthropology or the goals of ethnography?


 Abstracts should be submitted to Taylor Nelms (tnelms at uci.edu) and Adam
Leeds (leeds at sas.upenn.edu) by Monday, April 7.