Border Architectures and Subjectivities: Call for Papers for AAA 2012 San Francisco

Call for Papers for AAA 2012 San Francisco

Border Architectures and Subjectivities: Global Reflections on ‘Border Milieus’

Panel Organisers: Tina Harris (University of Amsterdam) & Malini Sur
(Amsterdam Institute for Social Science Research)

Between the excitement in the media over increases in transnational financial flows and alarming human rights violations under new security regimes, borders are becoming more and more relevant as sites of both mobility and enclosure (Heyman and Cunningham, 2004). These geographical edges of states are often the nerve centres of thriving informal commerce and financial flows, and, in more recent decades, zones of new technologies of identification, surveillance, and the frequent suspension of law. In this panel, we argue that the study of borders, border societies, and subjectivities that flow from borders can make critical contributions to the mobile turn or movement-driven social sciences (Urry and Buscher, 2009). We especially seek to explore new elements of connection and disjuncture that converge and produce ‘border milieus’ (Martinez, 1994). The panel proposes to interrogate the material bases of border architectures (such as fences, walls, checkpoints, military camps, and border roads) as objects of memory, artifacts of nation building, and as locations of everyday experiences of border crossings and exchange, bringing to light the multiple ways that on the ground experiences of border apparatuses contribute to the creation of borderland spaces. Contributors examine the varied ways in which these border architectures in heavily militarised border regions and war landscapes are animated, experienced and brought to life through recollections, trans-border friendship, transgendered subjectivities and transnational trade. We invite papers from warring and/or militarised border zones of Asia, Africa, the Middle East, the Americas, and Europe that engage with current debates in the anthropology of globalization, mobility, and violence. We especially seek contributors who investigate border architectures and subjectivities, inspired mobility and impeded mobility, gender and sexuality, race and nation, and trans-border trade and exchange.

Please email abstracts (250 words maximum) to c.h.harris[at]uva[dot]nl and maliniaissr[at]gmail[dot]com by March 20, 2012.

További infók itt.