[URBANTH-L]CFP: Rethinking Economic Zones in South Asia

[Jamie Cross]

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CFP: Rethinking Economic Zones in South Asia
Panel @ the 21st European Conference on Modern South Asian Studies
July 26th-29th, 2010, University of Bonn, Germany

Free trade zones, export processing zones and special economic zones 
have become controversial sites of planning, investment, and enterprise 
across South Asia. For anthropologists they have also come to be seen 
primarily as sites of 'neoliberal governance', in which national 
territory and working populations are oriented specifically in relation 
to their potential for growth and productivity.
 
This panel invites papers that rethink how economic zones operate and 
what they do.

Key questions and themes that the panel hopes to address include:

* To what extent are 'neoliberal imaginaries' realized in economic zones 
and translated into the production of neoliberal subjects?
* How have local histories of social transformation and trajectories of 
development planning shaped the implementation of economic zones?
* Are disciplinary regimes that hinge on the insecurity, flexibility and 
precariousness of labour be desribed as exceptional?
* What differences or continuities exist between economic zones and 
other spaces that are governed in relation to the global market (this 
may include sites of mineral extraction, private sector manufacturing 
and state run enterprise)?
* How have market-oriented modes of governance shaped notions of 
competition and individuality or solidarity and mutual-aid?

We invite papers based on current or recent empirical research in the 
fields of anthropology, geography, sociology, history, political science 
and development studies.  

For further information, please contract the panel organisers:
Jamie Cross, Department of Anthropology, Goldsmiths College, London -- 
/jamiejcross at gmail.com/
Christian Strüempell, South Asia Institute, Ruprecht Karls University 
Heidelberg - /struempell at eth.mpg.de



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