[Sugarman] CFP for Michigan workshop, November 2016

[Alf Nilsen]

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: <http://lists.wits.ac.za/pipermail/sugarman/attachments/20160510/b2e892e4/attachment-0001.html>
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: CFP Political Subjectivities and Popular Protest.docx
Type: application/vnd.openxmlformats-officedocument.wordprocessingml.document
Size: 101251 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <http://lists.wits.ac.za/pipermail/sugarman/attachments/20160510/b2e892e4/attachment-0001.docx>