From alfgunvald at gmail.com Tue May 10 15:50:18 2016 From: alfgunvald at gmail.com (Alf Nilsen) Date: Tue, 10 May 2016 15:50:18 +0200 Subject: [Sugarman] CFP for Michigan workshop, November 2016 Message-ID: Dear all - Please find attached and pasted below the final CFP for the Michigan workshop in November, entitled Political Subjectivities and Popular Protest: Transnational Flows and Vernacular Knowledges. Can we ask you to please circulate to potential participants via your personal lists? Thanks! Warm regards, Alf *Political Subjectivities and Popular Protest: Transnational Flows and Vernacular Knowledges* At certain conjunctures in our modern history, we have witnessed the eruption of waves of popular protest across multiple sites in the world system ? the mass movements of the 1960s, culminating in the global revolt of 1968, stands as an obvious reference point, and more recently the movements of the Arab Spring, resistance to austerity measures across the global North, student protests in South Africa and India, and the rise of BlackLivesMatter in the US all suggest that ours is also such a conjuncture of revolt. A defining feature of these conjunctures ? both in the recent past and in our turbulent present ? has been the presence of transnational flows of idioms, affects, practices, ideas, and aspirations between and across sites of popular protest. For example, black popular movements in the U.S. ? from the civil rights and black power movements to BlackLivesMatter--have both drawn on and contributed to transnational traditions of resistance to racism and colonialism. And protests centred on the decolonisation and decommodification of institutions of higher learning in South Africa fall within the orbit of a long trajectory of student activism on the African continent and elsewhere. However, at the same time, these transnational flows do not render eruptions of protest everywhere all the same. Rather, the idioms, affects, ideas, and aspirations that constitute the stuff of these flows are shaped and moulded in very specific ways as they come to be embedded in particular sites of resistance and mobilization. In these places, particular histories and geographies have produced complex intersections of identities and other vectors of power ? in no small part through past struggles and the victories, defeats, and truce lines that these have yielded ? that mediate transnational flows and constitute political subjectivities and popular protest as vernacular forms of knowledge. It is precisely this dialectic ? the dialectic between transnational flows and vernacular knowledges across different sites of protest, both past and present ? and the challenges that they pose for scholarly practice in the humanities and the social sciences that we want to interrogate at this workshop. We welcome 500-word abstracts centred around specific sub-themes such as affect, identities, inequalities, austerity, state violence, historical consciousness and public memory, intra-movement race, gender and class relations, crisis and transformation by 31 May. Potential paper topics might address, but are not limited to, the following questions: - How have formations of race, gender, and class converged to create generated global waves of popular protest at different points in modern history? What continuities and ? conversely ? discontinuities can be traced in these dynamics across historical time and geographical space? - How do activists forge identities, articulate affects, and define projects that resonate across distinct locales in the world-system? What are the modalities through which movement practices travel across sites of protest, and how do they come to be embedded in and shaped by particular places? - Is there a distinct political economy at play across sites and moments of contemporary popular protest? If so, how does this political economy condition the making of oppositional movement projects in the current era? - How do #RhodesMustFall, #FeesMustFall, #BBUM, and #BlackLivesMatter build upon and break with longer trajectories of student activism in Africa, North America, and elsewhere? - What are the shared intellectual resources that current movements draw on in South Africa, the US and elsewhere to craft collective oppositional projects? - What can and do earlier generations of organizers can offer to present-day activistts by way of example, inspiration, or orientation in the making of social movements? -- *"If there is no struggle there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom and yet depreciate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground, they want rain without thunder and lightening. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters."* *Frederick Douglass* *We Make Our Own History: Marxism and Social Movements in the Twilight of Neoliberalism * - See http://www.plutobooks.com/display.asp?K=9780745334813& *New Subaltern Politics: Reconceptualizing Hegemony and Resistance in Contemporary India* - See http://www.oup.co.in/isbn/9780199457557 *Dispossession and Resistance in India: The River and the Rage* - See http://www.routledge.com/books/details/9780415558648/ *Marxism and Social Movements* - See http://www.brill.com/marxism-and-social-movements *Social Movements in the Global South: Dispossession, Development and Resistance* - See http://www.palgrave.com/products/title.aspx?pid=395781 See also http://uib.academia.edu/AlfGunvaldNilsen -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... 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