[URBANTH-L]CFP LASA 2009: Globalization, Race and Sexuality Panel

[Erica Lorraine Williams]

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CALL FOR ABSTRACTS

LASA 2009 Congress: RETHINKING INEQUALITIES
XXVIII International Congress of the Latin American Studies Association
June 11-14, 2009 Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

Session Organizers: Aisha Beliso-De Jesus (Stanford University) and
Erica Lorraine Williams (Stanford University)

Panel:
Epistemologies of "The Global": Racing and Sexing the Transnational

This panel interrogates discourses of "globalization" that divide the
world into binaries of "the local" and "the global," and configure
these as separate entities in threat of colonization and in need of
rescue.  These discursive formations that conform to raced and sexed
meta-narratives of globalization challenges our work as ethnographers
and effectively silences the material violence and inequalities in the
daily lives of the people with whom we work. Racialized and sexualized
discourses are often glazed over when dealing with transnational
practices such as sex tourism, the circulation of culture and, the
commodification of spiritual/religious practices, which are depicted
as "symptoms" of global capitalism.  As ethnographers, we seek to
unsettle the dichotomies that are produced by these global
meta-narratives that would like to neatly place certain countries in
Latin America as "successful" examples of global restructuring, and
Others as "failures." This is especially urgent in the contemporary
moment, when Latin American countries are expected to follow scripted
programs of economic development and neoliberal markets that produce
new "global" consumers based on racial and sexual hierarchies and
historical relationships.  By bringing together diverse sites of
fieldwork in Latin America, we explore how the shaping of these
meta-narratives produces new technologies of power in specific
locations.  How are subjects inhabiting our field sites represented
and disciplined by the very discourses that produce them?  How do
their subjectivities and lived experiences of inequalities contest
master narratives of political economy, and globalization?  Our work
seeks to disrupt dichotomies that produce "agents" and "victims" of
"the global" through transnational ethnographic approaches.


For more information about LASA 2009, see
http://lasa.international.pitt.edu/congress/about.html

Please send no more than 150 word abstracts, together with the
following information to either AISHA BELISO-DE JESUS, and ERICA
WILLIAMS by MARCH 20, 2008.

Name
Contact details (email and phone)
Institutional affiliation
Brief description of relevant research experience, if applicable

Panel Organizers:
Aisha Beliso-DeJesus (PhD candidate, Department of Anthropology,
Stanford University) AND Erica Williams (PhD candidate, Department of
Anthropology, Stanford University) and

mail to: elw9 at stanford.edu AND aishab at stanford.edu



-- 
Erica Lorraine Williams
Ph.D Candidate
Department of Anthropology
Main Quad, Building 50
450 Serra Mall
Stanford University
Stanford, CA  94305-2034
elw9 at stanford.edu