CFP: SCA Spring Meeting: Natureculture and Multipli-“Cities”
CFP: SCA Spring Meeting
Meeting: Society for Cultural Anthropology Spring Meeting, Santa Fe, NM May 7-8, 2010
(http://sca.culanth.org/meetings/sca/2010/intro.html)
Conference Theme: “Natureculture: Entangled Relations of Multiplicity”
Panel: Natureculture and Multipli-“Cities”: New Engagements of Anthropology and Urbanism
Organizer:
Alex Nading
, Department of Anthropology, University of Wisconsin-Madison
Deadline for 250-word Abstracts: Dec. 1, 2009
Anthropologists have couched the cities they study as “networked,” “hybridized,” or “creolized” spaces for some time (one might argue, as far back as British studies of the Copperbelt and Leeds’ and Harris’ work in mid-20th century Brazil, and on to the more recent work of Hannerz, Low, and Rabinow). Nevertheless, the surge of interest in “relational ontologies” among contemporary social theorists has had a major impact on urban studies, in which scholars have begun to re-evaluate the concepts (e.g. class, household, neighborhood, urban, rural) on which city-society scholarship has long been based. If cities are better analyzed as an entangled series of networks with multiple meanings and multiple (human and nonhuman) loci of action and change, what methodological tools aid this analysis? The panel is open to scholars studying in any region who are interested in what contributions cultural anthropologists can make to the ongoing dialogue among political ecologists, geographers, and others about what has been termed “hybrid,” “cyborg,” or “metabolic” urbanization. (Key authors include Lefebvre, Harvey, Haraway, Latour, Massey, and Swyngedouw.) To what extent are such concepts useful in a world in which environmental and social problems are increasingly played out in cities? How do they serve or undermine the positions of the traditionally powerful (industrial, political, academic, gendered) players in urban development? In line with the meeting theme, organizers are looking for papers with an ethnographic basis that ask what implications a relational view of history, personhood, and the material world have for the study of urban landscapes.
The papers might address:
·
Urban kinship
·
Labor (human and nonhuman) in a globalizing world
·
Waste, consumption and environmental justice
·
“Green” capitalism
·
Health and infectious disease
·
Companion species
·
Urban agriculture
·
Rural/urban networks
·
Alternative, “community,” or non-capitalist economies
Please send 250-word abstract, full name, and institutional affiliation to Alex Nading (nading@wisc.edu) by December 1, 2009 for consideration.
