[Linganth] AAA 2020 CFP: Politics of Mediation

[Lily Ye]

Hi all,

See description below, and please circulate widely. If interested, please
send a 250-word or less abstract to Lily Ye (lilyye at uchicago.edu) and Aron
Marie (aronmarie at uchicago.edu) by Monday, March 23.

*Politics of Mediation*

*Abstract*

This panel concerns the reflexive uptake of mediation as a politically or
socially charged act. We define mediation broadly as the action of any
third party in producing a relationship between two entities, held to be
distinct, and take as given that mediation is a constitutive, unavoidable
phenomenon in social/material life. In particular, we examine attempts to
erase mediators in the service of truth, fidelity, objectivity, authentic
voice and other presumed goods, for example, in attempts to faithfully
translate research findings into contexts of practice in American education.

We seek to examine mediation in any form or modality, from documents and
videos, to translators and interpreters, to political events and speeches,
and so on. We consider ideologies of mediation across various political
contexts, from the work of sign language interpreters in mediating the
political representation of deaf people in Vietnam, to that of research
intermediaries in mediating the implementation of educational interventions
in the US.

What are the consequences of political vision becoming trained upon
mediation as a problem or solution? How do ideologies of mediation come to
themselves mediate particular forms of social/political organization, and
vice versa? In what contexts is mediation valued and when is it derided?
How does mediation become a site of ethics, and what animates ethical
debates around mediation?

Discussant TBD

Shenghe Ye
PhD Candidate | The University of Chicago
Department of Comparative Human Development
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