Call for Papers CASCA 2013 - Ethnographies of Democratic Deficits

Call for Papers CASCA 2013: Ethnographies of Democratic Deficits

Recent and long-running social justice movements ranging from pro-choice
campaigns and anti-austerity protests to Occupy, One Billion Rising and
Idle No
More all show how formal civil and political liberties may coexist with acute
socioeconomic injustices in ostensibly democratic states. Meanwhile, as
events
in Europe dramatically demonstrate, elected governments are frequently
answerable less to their own citizens than to such international
organizations
as the International Monetary Fund and the European Central Bank.

We are seeking papers that explore such inequities and various organized
responses to them, treating them as diagnostic of the deficits of democratic
citizenship in specific contexts, even as their genesis cannot be limited
to a
single scale. Possible themes include, but are not limited to, the following:

• "Think Globally/Act Locally"?: Challenges posed by the need to work
politically at multiple scales, in a world where democratic citizenship and
human rights are empowered primarily at the nation-state level while capital
operates "beyond borders";

• Struggles fought over and through the meaning of democracy;

• Case studies in disjunctive democracy: Explorations of Teresa Caldeira and
James Holston's argument that all actually-existing "democracies" are
more-or-less disjunctive in the sense that the enabling conditions of
democratic citizenship extend beyond the realm of electoral politics to
encompass such issues as bodily security and social welfare;

• The displacement of activist politics into the legal realm (for example,
through human rights cases), with attendant risks of depoliticization;

• Problems of governmentality: How does power work through the language and
machinery of democracy?;

• The uneasy relationship between democracy and capitalism in liberal states;

• How anthropologists might usefully contribute to these debates.


Please submit your abstracts (150 words) to Robin Whitaker (robinw@mun.ca)
and/or Josh Lalor (jd.lalor@mun.ca) by February 25th, 2013.

Thank you.

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