[Air-L] Graduate Conference CFP: Imagining Radical Futures, Princeton Oct. 5th

[EB Saldana]

Dear AOIR,

May be of interest to some in graduate programs - please circulate to
anyone who might be interested.

Thanks!

EB




*Imagining Radical Futures: Anthropological Potentialities?*
Princeton Anthropology Graduate Conference
October 5th, 2018
Princeton University

*“The facts, alone, will not save us. Social change requires novel fictions
that reimagine and rework*
*all that is taken for granted about the current structure of society”
(Benjamin 2016)*

    Anthropology has traditionally practiced restraint to speak only of
what we know by virtue of
"being there". Anthropologists have embraced the limitations of knowledge
while demonstrating the
power of attention to the specific and the particular, to contest
positivism and moralizing normativity.
Increasingly, governments and corporations attempt to mobilize
anthropological knowledge about
social change, geopolitical events, sustainability and resilience as a
predictive tool. Yet productive
recognition of indeterminacy that anthropological theory and practice
evokes opens doors to the
imaginary, the hopeful, the potential, and the dreamed. This conference
will explore the potential of
non-predictive futures in anthropological thought and the methodological
complexities of imagining
futures from the present.
    The binary of “dark anthropology” and “anthropology of the good”
(Ortner 2016) belies
complexities and tensions in anthropological approaches to social change:
anthropology can report,
embody, employ, and open toward or against utopian ideals. What are the
implications of imaginative
fictions for interlocutors, ethnographers, and the discipline? What radical
possibilities can
anthropology's fundamental questions about difference, relationality, and
power open for us as we
attempt to engage with futurity?
    We seek contributions from graduate students in anthropology whose work
contributes to
understanding imagined futures and extends the anthropological imagination.
How can anthropology
treat the imaginary as both a heuristic and a space of futurity? What
social role can anthropology play
in voicing potential futures otherwise? How can ethnographers engage
differently with interlocutors’
imagined futures?

Potential areas of inquiry include, but are not limited to, the following:
- New technologies
- Queering Progress
- Novel Fictions/Anthrofictions
- Nonhuman futures
- Creativity and imagination
- Climate and environment
- Hope at the margins
- Aging
- Temporality of Markets
- Policy

Interested applicants should submit an individual abstract (250-300 words)
in addition to brief
biographies on or before July 1st to antcon at princeton.edu. Limited travel
funds may be available
TBD.

*References*
Benjamin, Ruha. “Racial Fictions, Biological Facts: Expanding the
Sociological Imagination through Speculative Methods,” Catalyst:
Feminism, Theory, Technoscience: Vol 2, no. 2 (2016), 1-28.
Ortner, Sherry B. “Dark Anthropology and Its Others: Theory since the
Eighties.” HAU : Journal of Ethnographic Theory: Vol 6, no. 1
(2016): 47–73.