Short Abstract

What forms of political imagination emerge once liberalism no longer provides an uncontested horizon? This workshop explores ethnographic perspectives on the multiple, ambivalent and contradictory ways people, communities, movements and institutions engage with (post)liberalism.

Long Abstract

For several decades, liberalism appeared to constitute the largely uncontested horizon of political imagination, normative justification and institutional design. Today, however, liberalism is increasingly being challenged, defended, revised and abandoned across diverse social contexts, affectively, materially and politically. Rather than treating the erosion of liberalism's former hegemony as either a loss or a gain, this workshop starts from the observation that we are increasingly confronted with a postliberal condition in which liberalism can no longer be taken for granted as the uncontested horizon of political imagination. Anthropologists have long contributed to critiques of liberal modernity, while recent political developments have generated renewed concerns about authoritarianism, democratic backsliding and the future of liberal institutions. Yet these debates often remain bifurcated, obscuring the empirical diversity and theoretical complexity of contemporary engagements with (post)liberalism.

Rather than asking whether liberalism should simply be defended or rejected, this workshop deliberately seeks to bring into conversation the full spectrum of ethnographically grounded engagements with (post)liberalism. We are interested precisely in the diverse ways in which people, communities, movements and institutions are affectively, materially and politically moved by (post)liberalism: by selectively defending, contesting, appropriating, transforming or abandoning particular liberal traditions, institutions and languages, often in surprising and internally contradictory ways, or by articulating alternative political and normative projects beyond them. We welcome contributions from different world regions and historical settings that explore these diverse engagements with (post)liberalism, seeking to move beyond the unproductive opposition between liberal apologetics and anti-liberal critique by examining the complex, ambivalent and often contradictory ways in which liberalism continues to shape political imagination precisely through its contestation.