CALL FOR ABSTRACTS

LASA 2009 Congress: RETHINKING INEQUALITIES
XXVIII International Congress of the Latin American Studies Association
June 11-14, 2009 Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

Session Organizers: Aisha Beliso-De Jesus (Stanford University) and Erica Lorraine Williams (Stanford University)

Panel: Epistemologies of "The Global": Racing and Sexing the Transnational

This panel interrogates discourses of "globalization' that divide the world into binaries of "the local" and "the global," and configure these as separate entities in threat of colonization and in need of rescue. These discursive formations that conform to raced and sexed meta-narratives of globalization challenges our work as ethnographers and effectively silences the material violence and inequalities in the daily lives of the people with whom we work. Racialized and sexualized discourses are often glazed over when dealing with transnational practices such as sex tourism, the circulation of culture and, the commodification of spiritual/religious practices, which are depicted as "symptoms" of global capitalism. As ethnographers, we seek to unsettle the dichotomies that are produced by these global meta-narratives that would like to neatly place certain countries in Latin America as "successful" examples of global restructuring, and Others as "failures." This is especially urgent in the contemporary moment, when Latin American countries are expected to follow scripted programs of economic development and neoliberal markets that produce new ?global? consumers based on racial and sexual hierarchies and historical relationships. By bringing together diverse sites of fieldwork in Latin America, we explore how the shaping of these meta-narratives produces new technologies of power in specific locations. How are subjects inhabiting our field sites represented and disciplined by the very discourses that produce them? How do their subjectivities and lived experiences of inequalities contest master narratives of political economy, and globalization? Our work seeks to disrupt dichotomies that produce "agents" and "victims" of "the global" through transnational ethnographic approaches.

For more information about LASA 2009, see http://lasa.international.pitt.edu/congress/about.html

Please send no more than 150 word abstracts, together with the following information to either AISHA BELISO-DE JESUS, or ERICA WILLIAMS by MARCH 20, 2008.

Name
Contact details (email and phone)
Institutional affiliation
Brief description of relevant research experience, if applicable

Panel Organizers:
Aisha Beliso-DeJesus (PhD candidate, Department of Anthropology, Stanford University) AND
Erica Williams (PhD candidate, Department of Anthropology, Stanford University

mail to: elw9@stanford.edu AND aishab@stanford.edu