NeoLiberation: Cultural Logics of Reconstruction
Editors: Randel D. Hanson and Torin Monahan
Arizona State University

We are seeking contributions for a collected volume addressing the ramifications of neoliberalism in contemporary societies. Interdisciplinary and theoretical essays are encouraged, especially ones that explore the development of neoliberal regimes within specific cultural, geographical and/or institutional settings. We understand neoliberalism to be a cultural formation both creatively destructive and reconstructive in the transformation of late modern society, one that merges two trends. In one sense, neoliberalism represents a politics based on market forces, minimal government as it concerns 'citizen wages', consumerism and an ostensible freedom of choice; on the other hand, neoliberalism calls for more intrusive government, an assertive foreign policy, and greater levels of officially sanctioned discipline in the service of social control. These two seemingly opposite positions are less contradictory than they are complementary, and this project invites inquiry into the social worlds emerging from their overlap.

Topics might include, but are not limited to:

• Social-spatial Segregation: fortified enclaves of gated communities, privatized security forces, business improvement districts, sport utility vehicles (SUVs).
• InShoring Business: Private for-profit prisons, mass incarceration, criminalization of the poor, nuclear tourism, cultural appropriation and commodification.
• Medical Consumerism: patients as consumers, body as property, privatized clinical trials, FDA science for business.
• Surveillance and Security Regimes: technological encroachments upon public lives and civil liberties, policing of borderlands, national identification and biometric systems, Homeland Security, USA PATRIOT Act.
• Post-industrial Reservations: Industrial and nuclear waste sites and energy production facilities on tribal lands.
• Welfare Reform: Privatization and automation of welfare systems, destructive underside of welfare-to-work programs, corporate profiteering, and the elimination of civic accountability within social programs.
• Academic Capitalism: University and industry partnerships, accountability and audit regimes, intellectual property restrictions on public research.

Submission Deadline: December 1, 2004.

Please submit full papers (7-8,000 words) or extended proposals (preference will be given to full papers) and a one page C.V. to the address below.

For inquiries, email us at Randel.Hanson@asu.edu or Torin.Monahan@asu.edu