[URBANTH-L] CFP: Graduate Student Conference, "Roads and Walls: Concrete Histories"

[Angela Jancius]

 CFP Graduate Student Conference, "Roads and Walls: Concrete Histories"

Using the ability of roads and walls to speak to questions that matter, we
propose a graduate student conference on the social histories of roads and
walls. We are looking for papers in which concrete histories of particular
roads and walls open abstract questions of power and knowledge. We seek
papers from every disciplinary and subdisciplinary perspective; however, the
papers should address a core audience of anthropologists. The conference
will consider how histories of these strategic objects can enrich social and
cultural theory-and our knowledge of the world. If social theory in the
1990s was dominated by questions of global integration, the new century has
opened to questions of geopolitical hegemony and difference. One advantage
of these new questions is that they take us back to ancient empires and
their hinterlands as well as to emerging models of the future; they require
our attention to religion, hierarchy, and embedded custom, as well as market
flows. Social histories of roads and walls offer an exemplary model of the
new scholarship that we believe is needed. Alert to both difference and
interconnection, both the abstract and the concrete, roads and walls show us
how the architecture of social life forms and reforms us. We seek
provocative, insightful and historically and materially grounded papers that
take up these questions for a one-day symposium at the Department of
Anthropology, UC Santa Cruz. Send 250-word abstracts to
roadsandwalls at gmail.com

Contact Information
Jeremy Campbell
3589 19th St.
San Francisco CA 94110 United States
Phone: 831 3452995
Email: jeremy.m.campbell at gmail.com
URL http://roadsandwalls@blogspot.com