CFP - Politics and Histories of Social Imaginations
Anthropologica: Journal of the Canadian Anthropology Society
Anthropologica is planning a special issue on the politics and histories of social imaginations. It comes out of a need in anthropology, the social sciences, and beyond, to think about new forms of historical and political agency and engagement. The recent years seen have seen an explosion of works on (what in a broad sense) could be called the conditions for and limitations of social possibility. Unleashed - perhaps most infamously - by Michael Hardt’s and Antonio Negri’s work on Empire (2000) and Multitude (2004), but also informed by other engagements such as John Holloway’s Change the World without Taking Power (2002), and Mary Zournazi’s Hope: New Philosophies for Change (2002), new progressive movements and cultural styles are requiring a radical creativity of action and thinking in many forms. At the same time, the exuberant creativity and radical intellect of new protest movements, ranging from the Zapatista uprising to anti-sweatshop movements to indymedia to the Ontario Coalition against Poverty has envisioned new forms of agency. The proposed theme issue sees itself in dialogue with the concerns raised by these movements while simultaneously critically engaging their possibilities and limitations. The goal of this issue is to examine their strategies and tactics from historical, political, and aesthetic angles, and to interrogate the conditions of their making.
This special theme issue of Anthropologica will address themes such as:
- The formation of historical and political subjectivity
- The articulation of innovative forms of political action and styles
- The significance of the notion hope for political and cultural struggle
- The constitution of the conditions of political possibility in particular social and historical contexts
- The role of particular ideas and imaginations in the formation of political struggles
- The investigations of spaces of ‘openness’ and ‘freedom’ in political and historical contexts of agency and struggle.Deadline for submissions: September 30th, 2006.
Paper proposals may be sent by June 30th, 2006 to:
Petra Rethmann
Dept. of Anthropology
McMaster University
Hamilton, ON, Canada
L8S 4L9
rethman@mcmaster.ca