Call for Papers

Reclaiming “America”: The Tea Party in Ethnographic, Historical and Comparative Perspective
One-Day Workshop at the Graduate Center, CUNY, New York, New York on Friday, 26th October 2012

The Tea Party movement emerged in early 2009, decrying President Obama’s stimulus and health care plans. Initial protests explicitly evoked the symbolism of the 1773 Boston Tea Party and the Revolutionary War, while drawing on the ideological, organizational, and financial resources of contemporary libertarian and conservative struggles. Stories about the Tea Party quickly dominated the national media, and Tea Party groups became a substantial voice in local, state, and national politics by the elections of 2010.

This conference seeks to increase understanding of this influential new movement by bringing together scholars, researchers, and journalists to discuss: How are Tea Party politics inflected by regional differences? What roles are external resources, national organizations, or the Republican Party playing in this movement, particularly in interaction with local groupings? To what extent did the media magnify or even help bring into reality the Tea Party movement? How have Tea Party groups reinforced, reconfigured, or engaged with intersecting social divisions of race, citizenship status, gender, and/or sexuality? Where does the Tea Party movement build on or diverge from trajectories in US history? What is illuminated by comparing the Tea Party movement with the Occupy movement or with rightwing movements in other parts of the world? How do we understand and assess the impacts of the Tea Party movement in shifting public discourse or disrupting social, political or economic relationships? What is ethnographic work revealing about the composition, organization, appeal and impact of Tea Party groups?

We welcome abstracts, limited to 250 words, that examine these or related questions, by 1 September 2012. We will bring together a diverse group of scholars who have been examining the Tea Party and closely related formations from different disciplinary perspectives for an intensive, one-day workshop on Friday, 26 October 2012. All invited participants will be asked to submit a paper three weeks before the workshop to allow for a primary focus on discussion related to key themes and intersecting questions. Due to the wider relevance of this topic, we are pursuing the possibility of publishing an edited volume from these papers. The workshop will end with a public keynote presentation by the anthropologist Sandra Morgen (University of Oregon). Please send abstracts and direct questions to: teapartyworkshop2012@gmail.com.