[URBANTH-L]Call for Articles: The Politics of Populations

[Angela Jancius]

From: David Valentine valen076 at umn.edu

Call for Papers: The Politics of Populations

David Karjanen and Courtney Helgoe, editors.

This edited collection pushes scholarship beyond identity politics and 
critiques of biopower to
examine the practices, ideologies, and forces that forge the very 
populations which are objects of new and
transforming technologies of governance, cultural politics, and practice in 
an era of increasing integration and
conflict.

While neo-liberal global capitalism depends upon the accelerated movement of 
people and goods
across borders and spaces, heightened concerns about such flows--those of 
national security, public health, and
cultural identity-- pose strong resistance to this fluidity. At the same 
time, states are changing, issues of
security and risk are being transformed; new populations "made" and older 
populations "re-made." These
processes cut across all fields of intellectual theory and popular practice: 
politics, public health, demographics,
statistics, immigration control, and so forth, all contribute to the 
changing way populations are conceived,
made, and managed today.

At the center of these processes are institutions, practices, and cultural 
politics that determine who
and what will cross borders, who is appropriate to the nation, who can be a 
citizen, who merits being counted
in government statistics, who is a threat to public health, national 
security, and/or racial and sexual purity.
Such practices deploy both new and old technologies of risk, profiling 
assessments, and policies based on
legislation, fusing cultural and ideological constructs based on race, 
nation, gender, sexuality, religion, class,
and other forms of social differentiation.

Though we might expect globalization to diminish the importance of national, 
ethnic, racial, and
gendered identities, instead new techniques of identification are developing 
or being transformed- in
particular, that new forms of "population" are emerging, and older 
historical "populations" are re-emerging.
This raises a number of questions this volume addresses:

How do global economic and security conditions impact the methods and 
practices through which specific
populations are defined and managed?

How are different political or cultural domains brought together in the 
making of populations: such as public
health and national security, race and the economics of labor migration?
What are the historical and cultural precedents or antecedents to these 
methods?
What are the institutions and practices that forge populations, and with 
what consequences?
In short, how are certain groups "made" and reproduced, both through 
practices of representation and by more
institutional means: bureaucracies, statistics, policies, and so on?

Thematic Topics include:

* Biopolitics, surveillance, and public health
* Sexuality, reproduction, and "risky" populations
* Demographics and census-taking
* Racialization and Racial profiling
* Refugees, "asylum seekers" and economic migration
* Technologies of territory: visas, guest workers, citizenship,
border security
* Risk analysis and security assessment

Prospective chapters should be no more than 25-30 pages.

Please submit all proposals in abstract form to David Karjanen, Institute 
for Global Studies and Department of
American Studies, University of Minnesota.
Karjanen at umn.edu