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- Convenor:
-
Kathy Powell
(NUI Galway)
Send message to Convenor
- Chair:
-
Winnie Lem
(Trent University)
- Track:
- Producing the Earth
- Location:
- University Place 6.212
- Sessions:
- Friday 9 August, -
Time zone: Europe/London
Short Abstract:
This panel considers the challenges facing the production of radical political positionality and futurity in adverse critical and normative contexts and argues for the analytical recovery of the political subject and of material and political longings.
Long Abstract:
This panel considers the intellectual and empirical challenges facing radical political positionality and political futures: with the invasion of the social sciences by economism and critical theory increasingly dominated by post-structuralism and its neglect of the political subject, the field of political normativity has been left open to colonization by liberal abjections, cynical 'wisdoms' and revanchist forms of conservatism which marginalize and silence radical politics. In such a context there are strong arguments for the analytical 'recovery' of political positionality, organization and mobilization grounded in commitment to ideas and to political and material longings which seek to exceed a violently configured present.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Friday 9 August, 2013, -Winnie Lem (Trent University)
Paper short abstract:
This paper explores the conjunctures that have produced different political positionalities in anthropology. It examines the political and ideological formations that inform such conjunctures and which condition the demise of radical analytical paradigms and the rise of unreflective liberalism in the anthropology of migration as a case in point
Paper long abstract:
This paper is an exploration of the conjunctures that have produced different political positionalities that have prevailed in the past few decades in anthropology. It does this by suggesting that as scholars, our work is part of an intellectual labour process that is embedded in a social world which conditions distinctive practices, analytical optics and positionalities. By exploring the political and ideological formations that inform such conjunctures and therefore the intellectual labour process, this paper charts the demise of radical analytical paradigms and the rise of unreflective liberalism in the analytics that frame objects of inquiry. Anthropological interventions in the study of migration will be used as a case in point and I will suggest ultimately that the resuscitation of radical paradigms offer the most effective analytic optic in confronting the relationship between people, cross border movements, and the current conditions of crisis and adversity. Overall, this paper argues for the assertion of radical paradigms and the reinsertion of the anthropologist as a radical critic of the contemporary world.
Su-ming Khoo (University of Galway)
Paper short abstract:
This paper considers the project of ‘development’ and the futures of critical development theory after the MDGs. It explores a central dilemma of rights, the tension between the collective politics of developmentalism and (de/re)-politicising normative and performative forms of humanitarianism.
Paper long abstract:
'Development' is a term that signifies both hegemonic futurity and resistance on a global scale. This paper considers the state of critical development theory and the global 'development consensus' before and after the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs, 2000-2015). Development debates divide advocates of the market, the 'developmental state' and the human subject of liberal development theory. Human rights based approaches (HRBA) attempt to offer an alternative to the market's 'stark utopia'. Yet a tension remains, within the human rights canon and its instruments, between collective socio-economic developmentalism and the free, individual liberal subject. 'Third generation' collective rights emerged in the 1970s, alongside self-determination, the right to existence, indigenous rights and minority rights. Such claims cut across discourses of economic and political nationalism and decolonization, although the latter persist in the face of globalization and fragmentation.
The paper explores this central dilemma of rights, examining the tensions between the collective politics of developmentalism and the de-politicising and re-politicising potentials of normative and performative forms of humanitarianism, including 'human rights', 'human development' , 'humanitarian assistance' and 'poverty reduction'. The discussion considers the central tensions/dilemmas between the collective political subjectivity and positionality of developmental claims/goods and a variety of normative humanitarian claims/goods and performativities that range from demands for 'meaningful participation' and alternative collective futures to banal celebrity humanitarianism. The potential of 'meaningful participation' to redefine and pluralise development's futures is explored through a consideration of three 'immediate action areas' of the Right to Development: food futures, health futures and education futures.
Ananthakrishnan Aiyer (University of Michigan - Flint)
Paper short abstract:
ANT and marxism - continuing the debate
Paper long abstract:
While ANT (actor network theory) should be credited for bringing back, especially Marxist, older anthropological concerns, by its focus on relationality and human-nature interactions, the field has failed miserably when it comes ot politics. This is both, at epistemological and analytical levels, and it becomes especially clear while trying to analyze insurgent politics. This paper takes a close look at ANT as it might be applied to a concrete situation, the Maoist insurgency in India. The paper aims to interrogate the politics of ANT and where it may or may not be useful to Marxist analysis.
Kathy Powell (NUI Galway)
Paper short abstract:
This paper considers how democratization in Mexico has been harnessed to the exclusion of the left and the continued effectiveness of coercive forms of rule; representative democracy nonetheless provides an ideological framework which shapes political positionality and sites of political struggle.
Paper long abstract:
The relationship between the suppression of the left during Mexico's 'dirty war' and subsequent democratization processes has meant that more robust electoral competition has favoured the rise of the right and the consolidation of a political environment which works against diurnal struggles to secure well being, equality and political rights - an environment latterly characterized by unprecedented levels of violence associated with organized crime and militarization. While these developments have generated a strengthening of radical and reformist opposition, the 2012 Presidential election confirmed fears that democratization has so far entailed a shift from a one party state to a politics of 'alternation' between political parties wedded to an authoritarian neoliberalism deeply implicated in the marginalization which benefits capital and the narco economy. This paper argues that this poses serious challenges for a radically different politics: firstly, democratic processes have been harnessed to the demarcation of shared normative boundaries which exclude and discredit the left. Secondly, alternation has 'democratized' rather than superseded 'older' patriarchal and coercive forms of governance/ political practice; more consolidated electoral democracy has become the condition for their continued instrumentality in reproducing configurations of power. Nonetheless, representative democracy cannot be considered as a 'formal façade' masking 'actually existing' political relations and practices but as an ideological framework in which the politics of belief - not necessarily progressive - are built and contested, and in which 'undemocratic' political practice is experienced and understood; beyond institution and procedure, struggles for democracy shape and constrain struggles over the meaning of political life.