[URBANTH-L]CFP: The Anthropology of 'The Real Thing': Developing an Activist Research Agenda for Corporate Globalization

[Robert T. O'Brien]

CFP: "The Anthropology of 'The Real Thing': Developing an
Activist Research Agenda for Corporate Globalization"
105th AAA meeting in San Jose, CA
(November 15-19, 2006)
Deadline for abstracts: March 15, 2006
 
Papers will address the need to think of corporate
globalization at both the macro/theoretical level and at the
local/ethnographic/grassroots level. Panelists are sought who
can locate their work within a discussion about the utility of
looking at transnational corporations (TNCs) as a way of
locating struggles about environmental, labor, health, and
human rights issues in both the local and the global.
Panelists should seek to press beyond a practicing/theory or
activist/academic dichotomy. 

Although a discussion of Coca-Cola and the San Francisco MEG
hotels will be included as illustrative recent examples of
anthropology and anthropologists thinking through corporate
globalization, presenters do not need to use Coke or the
hotels as a research site -- simply touching on them as
examples and then discussing the potential for including
analysis of a particular TNC situated in their own field site
 should suffice.

In a twist on the tradition of interlocutor panels activists
from United Students Against Sweatshops' Coca-Cola campaign
and one other group have been invited to serve as discussants.
Additional discussants from within the discipline would also
be welcomed (particularly in the event of a double session).

The session will attempt to answer two central questions for
activist research in the context of 21st Century corporate
globalization:
 
Is there potential for gaining some purchase on "global
capitalism" as the effect(s) of located (if differentially
powerful and mobile) agents to be found in comparative
analysis of the local effects of a single TNC by
teams of anthropologists?
 
Can anthropologists with an applied or activist perspective
coordinate research and data dissemination on the effects of
particular TNCs and the remedies imagined or practiced in
particular locales?
 
Abstracts of 250 words or less, in AAA format, should be
emailed to robrien at temple.edu.
 
 
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"Neither we nor our most distant descendants will build the
New Jerusalem
or the Garden of Eden; but we have, if we choose it, the
pleasure of
clearing the ground, hoping that one day other hands will
cultivate
something more like a garden -- a flawed and human garden,
under sun,
clouds, fog, and rain, with our own ants and slugs and
weevils, but alive
with our own raspberry  bushes, too, our weeping cherries and
roses, our
own vines, and our own fig trees."
-- Michael Steinberg, _The Fiction of a Thinkable World_
 
Robert T. O'Brien 
Ph.D. Candidate
Department of Anthropology 
Temple University 
 <mailto:robrien at temple.edu> robrien at temple.edu 
215-803-5181
 
AAAUnite Ad Hoc Committee
 <http://AAAUnite.blogspot.com> http://AAAUnite.blogspot.com
 <http://groups.yahoo.com/group/aaaunite/>
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/aaaunite/
 

****************************************
"Neither we nor our most distant decendants will build the New Jerusalem or the Garden of Eden; but we have, if we choose it, the pleasure of clearing the ground, hoping that one day other hands will cultivate something more like a garden -- a flawed and human garden, under sun, clouds, fog, and rain, with our own ants and slugs and weevils, but alive with our own raspberry  bushes, too, our weeping cherries and roses, our own vines, and our own fig trees."
-- Michael Steinberg, _The Fiction of a Thinkable World_

Robert T. O'Brien 
Ph.D. Candidate
Department of Anthropology 
Temple University 
robrien at temple.edu 
215-803-5181

AAAUnite Ad Hoc Committee
http://AAAUnite.blogspot.com
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/aaaunite/