Biennial Conference of the Finnish Anthropological Society 2017
Entangled Mobilities
22th—23th of May 2017, University of Jyväskylä, Finland
Organizers: The Finnish Anthropological Society, anthropologists at the Department of History and Ethnology, University of Jyväskylä
Biennial Conference of the Finnish Anthropological Society 2017
Anthropologists have long recognized the complexities of the flows of people, ideas and objects through time and space. Nevertheless, in public discourses mobility tends to be equated mainly with migration. The Biennial Conference of the Finnish Anthropological Society 2017 seeks to explore different kinds of mobilities and their interconnections. We ask how are spatial and social mobilities entangled with each other and broader economic, social and political processes. We invite papers which explore following themes: place making; production of boundaries; relationships between actors of mobility (states, citizens, genders classes, generations, the rural and the urban); artifacts and technologies of mobility (new media, material culture, vehicles and food); imaginaries of mobility; movement of ideas and structures (such as education, notions of kinship and family, marriage). We invite all anthropologists and researchers from related disciplines to participate!
Call for Papers
Call for papers of the Biennial Conference of the Finnish Anthropological Society 2017 “Entangled Mobilities” in Jyväskylä is now open. We invite papers which fall within the theme of the conference.
The Biennial Conference of the Finnish Anthropological Society 2017 seeks to explore different kinds of mobilities and their interconnections. We ask how spatial and social mobilities are entangled with each other and broader economic, social and political processes. We invite papers which explore following themes: place making; production of boundaries; relationships between actors of mobility (states, citizens, genders classes, generations, the rural and the urban); artifacts and technologies of mobility (new media, material culture, vehicles and food); imaginaries of mobility; movement of ideas and structures (such as education, notions of kinship and family, marriage). We invite all anthropologists and researchers from related disciplines to participate!
The deadline for paper proposals is 23rd of February 2017. Notifications of acceptance will be sent by early March.
Paper proposals can be submitted for consideration for confirmed panels or without specifying the panel. If you wish to choose a panel for your paper, send you proposal directly to the panel organizers but also send a copy to the organizer (mobilityconference2017@nullgmail.com). If you do not wish to choose a panel, send your paper proposal only to the conference organizers (mobilityconference2017@nullgmail.com).
To submit your paper proposal, send the following information: name, affiliation, contact information, the title of the paper, the abstract (max. 200 words) and the name of the panel you wish to participate (see the list of panels) to the e-mail addresses of the organizers of the panel in question and to the conference organizers (mobilityconference2017@nullgmail.com).
If you do not want to choose any of the advertised panels, leave out the panel information and only send your proposal to mobilityconference2017@nullgmail.com.
Keynote speakers
Professor Purnima Mankekar (Departments of Gender Studies and Asian American Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles): Affective Sovereignties: Mobility, Emplacement, and Communication in a Transnational World
In this talk, I will examine how call center agents, who work at the lowest rungs of the Business Process Outsourcing industry in Bangalore, India, navigate the worlds in which they find themselves. Drawing on long term ethnographic research in Business Process Outsourcing firms, analyze how call center agents engage in different forms of mobility: spatial, temporal, cultural, and experiential. I argue that their ability to be mobile traverses different scales and is at the heart of their ability to perform affective labor. At the same time, communication – the ability to not just speak with but, more importantly, empathize with customers at vast geographical, cultural, and experiential distance from them – is also critical to their performance of affective labor. Yet, their world is replete with misunderstanding, missed connections, and lost connections, belying the promise of information technology as a mode of making communication across the transnational world seamless.
Senior researcher Hans Lucht (Danish Institute for International Studies, Copenhagen): Migrant Underworlds. Travels in Hyporeality
Based on fieldwork in Ghana, Niger, and Libya this paper discusses the growing restrictions on mobility for West Africans in a time of change and upheaval. Focusing on high-risk migration from a Ghanaian fishing village via Libya to Europe, the focus is on migrant deaths in the Sahara and the Mediterranean Sea and the less understood local ramifications of these deadly journeys. It is argued that migrant fatalities are traits of an emerging form of reality – or hyporeality – in which lives are increasingly short and underwhelming and characterized by incarceration and iconoclasm.