[URBANTH-L]AAA CFP: Natures of Capitalism, Subjects of Democracy

[Yoon-Jung Lee]

Natures of Capitalism, Subjects of Democracy

This panel explores the question of land as a critical juncture where market
capitalism and liberal democracy meet.  With the expansion of global
capitalism and the proliferation of the languages of democracy, the
overlapping of the two triads in classical political economy,
“capital-labor-land” and “state-subject-territory,” demand more rigorous
academic investigation.  Corporations have increasingly adopted states’
governmental technologies to affect populations, while state governments
have stepped up their efforts to integrate the business model into their
operational logic.  Despite the wide circulation of discourses of
transnational mobility, the tropes of place and community have become
increasingly resilient, challenging us to reconsider the conventional
meaning of land as a mere site of natural resources and human settlement.
    In this context, “land” emerges as a critical locus of power relations.
On the one hand, it is a source of raw materials for the operation of
capitalism.  On the other hand, it is the ground for practices of the state
and citizens, either as territory or property.  Furthermore, in the wake of
the development of modern environmental thinking and discourses of the
(ine)quality of citizenship, human engagement with land – whether mining,
logging, tourism, spatial development for the electronics industry – has
involved the production of intricate power networks and the formation of
subjects of capitalist democracy.  Through different stories of modernity
woven around gold, silicon and other parts of "nature," this panel examines
multiple modes of citizenry that arise from tensions between and within
market capitalism and liberal democracy and from the simultaneous
construction of the local and the global.

Please send us a title, a 250-word abstract, and your academic
affiliations for consideration for a proposed panel for the 2006
meeting of the AAA. The abstracts are due Tuesday, March 28th.

Please email materials to:

Nejat Dinc: dinc at stanford.edu
Yoon Jung Lee: yjlee at stanford.edu