[Linganth] ASA CFP - Imagining and creating walls, utopias, and co-fragile formations

[Teruko Vida Mitsuhara]

*Dear Colleagues, The 2018 ASA UK and Commonwealth conference is coming up
this September in Oxford! We welcome paper submissions to our panel, which
has already been accepted by the conference.  We look forward to your
submissions!  Association of Social Anthropologists of the UK and
CommonwealthASA18: Sociality, matter, and the imagination: re-creating
Anthropology18-21 September 2018, Examination Schools, University of Oxford
Accepted Panel:  Imagining and creating walls, utopias, and co-fragile
formationsOrganizers: Teruko Mitsuhara and Matthew McCoy, University of
California, Los AngelesThe wall has again become the dominant trope in
current discourses and imaginaries. For some, walls signify the potential
for utopia and for others, the wall serves as protection against those
beyond. Accordingly, this panel examines the ways in which societies,
communities, and individuals come to form fragile barriers and
estrangements between themselves and others. Recently, Wendy Brown (2010)
has argued that during periods of waning State sovereignty, walls "produce
not the future of an illusion, but the illusion of a future aligned with an
idealized past." We want to open a space for ethnography to address the
varieties of practices, interactions, narratives, ideologies, and
subjectivities emerging in such spaces. We are, however, aware that walled
spaces or enclosures within the contemporary global context are what Peter
Sloterdijk calls, intertwined "co-fragile systems." Using the metaphor of
"foam," Sloterdijk conceptualizes society "as an aggregate of microspheres
(couples, households, businesses, associations) [...which] are layered over
and under one another, yet without truly being accessible or effectively
separable from one another" (2016). In this way, we can see communities as
precariously layered by multiple and porous enclosures. We encourage
panelists to explore their ethnographic data on segregated or enclosed
communities to address the role of participants' (co-)constructed
imaginaries in constituting barriers. These barriers may take form in
border regions, religious enclaves, ghettos, intentional communities, gated
neighborhoods, and other spaces. In short, we ask, in what ways do people
imagine, contest, and normalize the creation and maintenance of divisions?
Note: The organizers themselves will be presenting their ethnographic
research on walled communities in Mayapur, India and Belfast, Northern
Ireland, respectively.Instructions for Submitting a Paper   Paper proposals
must consist of:- a paper title- the name/s and email address/es of the
author and co-authors- a short abstract of fewer than 300 characters- a
long abstract of fewer than 250 wordsAll proposals must be made via the
online form
<https://nomadit.co.uk/asa/asa2018/conferencesuite.php/panels/6813>, not by
email. Go to the “Propose paper” link and follow the instructions from
there to submit your paper for consideration. Please submit the paper by
April 20th. We will then make the decisions by May 2nd (the conference
deadline) and communicate those to the proposers. To submit you do not need
to pay registration fees. *


-- 
Teruko Vida Mitsuhara, M.A.
PhD Candidate in Anthropology
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