1st Graduate CASA – SASA Conference*

CALL FOR PAPERS

It is characteristic of neoliberalism that market relations, once confined to areas traditionally defined as ‘economic’, are increasingly penetrating into other spheres of social life. As a result, Neoliberal conceptions and practices have become intimately involved in our understanding of social relations, and ideas concerning the free market, individualism and rationally acting subjects are increasingly being invoked in diverse social and cultural fields. People activate their social networks to sell the products of international companies; homes become sites of labour when workers are hired to look after children or the elderly; schools offer programs to teach children the basics of entrepreneurship; and health, education and even leisure time are colonized by the imperatives of rationality, individualism, effectiveness and freedom of choice.

Within this milieu, individuals are encouraged to analyze their lives in terms of cost, profit, risks, investments, or insurance. Those who are considered incapable of economic (in the sense of effective and rational) behaviour are morally denounced, disadvantaged, even marginalized. Furthermore, social inequalities are often denied, naturalized and explained away by economic elucidations.

We would like to invite graduate students of social anthropology and other disciplines to submit papers and panel suggestions which deal with the following, or similar, topics:

• The economization of social relationships and various aspects of life including family, health, leisure, private and public space, etc. from various standpoints (studies of migration, religion, gender, disabilities etc.).

• The transformation of work, labour and entrepreneurship (emotional labour, domestic labour, creative work, aesthetic labour)

• Money and monies: different meanings and uses of money

• Moral economy and alternative currencies

• The transformation of policies and uses of different legitimizing categories (“individual responsibility”, “moral” behaviour etc.)

• The uses of numbers and statistics in the public sphere (opinion polls, measures of criminality, etc.)

• Credit and indebtness in people’s lives

We ask that abstracts be no more than 300 words in length and be sent to antropologie@fhs.cuni.cz by July 8, 2011. Candidates will be informed by July 31, 2011 if their papers or panel suggestions have been accepted.

The graduate conference will take place on September 2, 2011 in Telč, Czech Republic, as part of the second international CASA / SASA (Czech Association for Social Anthropologists / Slovak Association for Social Anthropologists).

* The conference is financed by Research Grant FHS K 263 706 administered by Faculty of Humanities, Charles University in Prague.