Call for Papers The Politics of Populations

An edited volume
Abstracts due January 15th, 2007

While an increasingly neo-liberal global capitalism depends upon the accelerated movement of people and goods across borders, heightened concerns about national border security pose a strong resistance to this fluidity. At the center of this contradiction sit the institutions, practices, and cultural politics that determine who and what will cross the border, who is appropriate to the nation, who can be a citizen, who merits being counted in government statistics, and by what means. Such practices deploy both new and old technologies of risk, profiling assessments, and policies based on legislation, fusing cultural and ideological constructs based on race, nation, gender, sexuality, religion, and class. Though we might expect these processes associated with a global political economy to diminish the importance of national, ethnic, racial, and gendered identities, what we find instead is that new techniques of identification have come into play – in particular, that new forms of “population” are emerging, and older historical “populations” are re-emerging. This raises a number of questions that we would like this volume to address:

How are the methods by which populations are defined affected by global economic and security conditions? How are global conditions reciprocally affected by various approaches to population? What are the historical and cultural precedents or antecedents to these methods? What are the institutions that forge populations, and with what consequences? In short, how are certain groups “made” and reproduced, both through practices of representation and by more institutional means: bureaucracies, statistics, policies, and so on?

At the center of this inquiry is the unifying concept of a “population.”
“Population” itself is a term with decidedly ambiguous origins, but real political impact. In this volume we seek to move beyond a traditional discussion of population politics -- demographic policies, reproductive rights debates, or immigration policy -- to delve deeper and interrogate the ideologies, politics, and cultural forces that shape the making and unmaking of populations within these and other fields. We encourage an interdisciplinary and accessible approach to these questions, such that the volume will be broadly useful to a number of disciplines.

Thematic Topics include:

• Immigration debates in a neo-liberal economy

• Demographics and census-taking

• Racial profiling

• U.S. Homeland Security and civil liberties

• Refugees, “asylum seekers” and economic migration

• Technologies of territory: visas, guest workers, citizenship, border security

• The role of non-governmental institutions in border security

• Public health policy and immigration

• Risk analysis and security assessment

Prospective chapters should be no more than 25-30 pages.

Submit abstracts of 300 words or less with contact information to: Karjanen@umn.edu

David Karjanen
Assistant Professor
Institute for Global Studies and Department of American Studies
104 Scott Hall
72 Pleasant St
Minneapolis, MN 55455
(612) 626-7267 (phone)
(612) 624-3858 (fax)
Karjanen@umn.edu