I am organizing a panel on "Ethnographic & Theoretical Perspectives on Resistance and Activism at Borderscapes" for the AAA (http://www.aaanet.org/meetings/futureaaameetings.cfm) to be held in December 2009 in Philadelphia. I would like to invite papers that contribute to developing theoretical and emperical perspectives on this topic. Please send me your abstracts of no more than 250 words by March 1, 2009. (I am aiming for the panel to be considered as an invited session). The full panel description is copied below.

Many thanks
fazila

Fazila Bhimji, Ph.D.
University of Central Lancashire
E-Mail fbhimji@uclan.ac.uk

Ethnographic and Theoretical Perspectives on Resistance and Activism at Boorderscapes Rajaram and Grundy-Warr (2007) use the term borderscape to highlight the fact that this concept is not always located in a specific space nor recognizable in a physical location but rather experienced tangentially in struggles to clarify inclusion from exclusion. They write that the border expands or contracts and operates differentially before different groups of migrants, giving rise to multiple resistances, challenges, and counterclaims. Keeping this definition in mind the proposed panel seeks to examine and discuss the different types of activism, resistance, and agency within borderscapes. The papers will examine how agency is created and articulated within border spaces, how agency and resistance are constrained by structural and political forces, the challenges that actors encounter, the multiple modes of resistance, the debates around different types of activism, the different types of strategies that activists employ, the successes and failures of the activists, the kinds of coalitions and networks formed, the historical context of the movements, and finally the ways in which activists dialogue with each other across gender, race, class, religious and geographical boundaries. Milagros Peña (2007) points out in her study of ‘Latina Activists across Borders’ that women’s political struggles and mobilization can be best understood in the local histories of feminist and other movements. Furthering this discussion, the panel will aim to look beyond the emergence of such struggles and will explore some of the slippages, discordance, and tensions that arise in the course of these movements since struggles, agency, resistance very often tend be idealized. In exploring the complexities of various forms of struggles at borderscapes, the panel will contribute to furthering scholarship such that the border continues to be conceptualized in dynamic ways: as a site of resistance and struggle rather than exclusively a space of oppression for migrants.