CASCA2014 CFP: Plenary: “Unsettled Politics and Radical Potential: Figuring the Impulse to Act” - Panel: Rivalling Powers: Alternative Configurations of the Political Sphere

CfP

*Submission Deadline Extended*: February 13, 2014

Conference: CASCA 2014

Plenary: "Unsettled Politics and Radical Potential: Figuring the Impulse
to Act"
http://casca2014.apps01.yorku.ca/plenary/

Panel: Rivalling Powers: Alternative Configurations of the Political Sphere

Organizer: Arne Steinforth, York University

Discussant: Kabir Tambar, Stanford University

Across present-day societies, the moral legitimacy of nation-states as
well as their agents appears to be the subject of increased scrutiny,
critique, and challenge. The forms of public action and resistance this
triggered ranges from large-scale political movements and organized
protests all the way down to subversive grassroots discourse. In the
process, people overcome different kinds of repression in order to
reconstitute themselves as political actors, finding novel points of
convergence and creating alternative rationales of imagined landscapes of
power. The injustices that motivate their action, the frames of reference
within which they are articulated, and the common ground they generate
along the way provide valuable ethnographic data of the shared notions,
desires, needs, and visions that drive processes of social transformation
in their respective local settings. The central concern of this panel is
the politics of pluralism – whether as a reaction to times of increased
social insecurity or as resurgence of previously existing alternative
configurations of the political sphere. Contributors are invited to
address a range of issues including (but not limited to) considerations of
cosmology and politics, utopianism, and other shared visions of a more
desirable political future.

Please submit your paper proposal including title, an abstract (max 150
words), your name, email address and affiliation to oalexand@yorku.ca no
later than February 13th.