|AAA Annual Meeting Announcement (View all AAA Annual Meeting Announcements)|
CFP AAA 2014: Re/Producing the Social: Ethnographic Perspectives on Power, the 'State' and Social Assistance in the Post-Neoliberal Reform Era
|Sponsor: Holly Dygert (Assistant Professor of Anthropology, Rhode Island College)|
CFP - Proposed AAA panel: RE/PRODUCING THE SOCIAL: ETHNOGRAPHIC PERSPECTIVES ON POWER, 'THE STATE,' AND SOCIAL ASSISTANCE IN THE POST-NEOLIBERAL REFORM ERA For students of social assistance, the early 1980s marks a significant historical moment, as advocates of neoliberalism gained the traction they needed to challenge social democratic visions of the social state. Since then, scholars have situated shifting approaches to the provision of social assistance in relation to the rise of neoliberalism and to movements against it. The resulting body of work has captured the devastation caused by the retraction of the social state, and the inadequacy of the strategies designated to ameliorate suffering in its wake. Moreover, scholars have documented the emergence of new social arrangements and modalities of power associated with market based strategies of governance. In doing so, they have made crucial contributions to debates over the value and viability of the social state, and the benefits and drawbacks of neoliberal approaches to the social. Ethnographic studies, however, may undermine some of the key assumptions guiding this work: by tracking how initiatives that have been produced through diverse histories and informed by varied logics come together to shape social processes, these studies dissolve the presumed rupture between neoliberal and social initiatives. This panel brings together a collection of ethnographic examinations of the social that muddle fast distinctions between neoliberal and embedded liberal regimes. In doing so, it queries the politics of ethnographic stances to social transformations, asking what is lost and what is gained in ethnographic re-productions of 'the social'? Multiple contributors examine the popular conditional cash transfer (CCT) approach. As state-centered economic assistance programs, CCTs diverge from the social arrangements scholars have typically identified with neoliberalism. Nonetheless, in many ways, CCTs reflect and condense important transformations in social citizenship associated with neoliberalism. We seek additional contributions that illustrate the limits of constructions of the social that emphasize a rupture between the neoliberal and the social. If you are interested, please send your paper title and abstract to Holly Dygert at email@example.com by April 10th. Contributors will need to register for the conference prior to submitting the final abstract as part of the panel by the deadline, April 15.
|Keywords: CFP | social assistance | neoliberal|
|This announcement will be displayed until: 04/15/2014|