[URBANTH-L]AAA 2008 CFP

[Monica DeHart]

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CALL FOR PAPERS / AAA 2008

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FROM REMITTING MIGRANTS TO MARKET-SAVVY ENTREPRENEURS: 

RECONCEPTUALIZING DIASPORA AND DEVELOPMENT

 

Hailed for the potency of their economic, social, political, and
professional contributions, transnational migrants are increasingly cast
as ideal arbiters of development. Experts, policy makers, and scholars
have debated the role that these diasporic individuals might play at
"home;" while some have indexed their participation as a sort of
development "from below," others have regarded organized efforts to
"harness" migrants' development potential with great suspicion. 

This panel provides a global perspective on the re-imagination of
diasporic subjects and their relationship to development through the
discourse of entrepreneurism.  In doing so, it aims to complicate
scholarly assumptions about the shifting relationships between diasporic
populations, governing bodies, and global circuits of money, labor, and
knowledge. The panel takes as its point of departure the important roles
that states, international institutions, non-governmental organizations,
and scholars have played in producing diasporic communities as
development agents.  Drawing on diverse contexts, actors, and
experiences, the papers explore important shifts in how migrants, their
skills and diasporic knowledges, and the money they send home have been
conceptualized, especially by those entities who would seek to profit
from them.  To this end, the papers interrogate how migrants have been
redefined as entrepreneurs or investors whose rational, self-interested,
and future-oriented decisions are thought to have the potential for
generating change.  Additionally, they analyze remittances, not just as
artifacts of transnational movement, but rather as the product of
diverse institutional efforts and discourses, as well as fertile
investments with long-term productive implications in and of themselves.
Through this focus, the panel seeks to illuminate patterns and
contradictions in the re-imagining of diasporic subjects and objects, as
well as discern their implications for differently situated global
actors.  

We seek contributions that interrogate the perceived "logics" of
transnational migration and development and that trace how subjects and
objects are refashioned as migration and development are tied together
through expert analyses, economic and social policies, and scholarly
discourse.  Papers included in the panel already include a focus on
Senegalese and pan-Latino transnational initiatives.  We welcome papers
that will further reinforce and extend the global scope of this
discussion.     

Please send an abstract of your paper proposal for the panel to
co-organizers:

Caroline Melly (UC Irvine) carolinemelly at gmail.com and Monica DeHart
(University of Puget Sound) mdehart at ups.edu

 

 

Monica  DeHart

Assistant Professor of Anthropology

Comparative Sociology Department

University of Puget Sound

1500 N Warner St

Tacoma, WA 98416-1500

(253) 879-3491

mdehart at ups.ed