[ecrea] Arizona ICA Preconference CFP

The Philosophy of Communication and Popular Communication divisions seek 
submissions to participate in a co-sponsored panel on Citizenship, 
Culture and Sovereignty as part of the Arizona and Beyond 
inter-divisional 2012 ICA preconference.

Description and Rationale:
Arizona’ SB 1070 has put into place harsh measures aimed at identifying 
and deporting the undocumented, including criminalizing being without 
documents at any time, authorizing police to stop anyone suspect of 
being undocumented, and criminalizing helping the undocumented. The law 
has been widely criticized for its de facto requirement of racial 
profiling, exceeding state authority, and for its cruelty.

SB 1070 is just one part of the broader effort to control migrants and 
the physical space of the border within the U.S. and abroad. These 
efforts have notably surfaced in law and in architectural and 
technological interventions aimed at controlling the physical spaces of 
borders (walls, video surveillance). These efforts are attempts to 
instantiate or buttress state and national sovereignty, as traditionally 
understood. Sovereignty as a political concept is an idea of 
independence and self-determination linked to control of both territory 
and policy. Commonly, it equates this independence with military, 
political, and social control of geographic territory. This concept of 
sovereignty is written into national and international law and deeply 
entwined with many political systems and distributions of power. Control 
of flows of people and of legal citizenship is one of these expressions 
of sovereignty. The use of cultural policy and communication 
infrastructure to privilege notions of national singularity and 
distinction is another.

At the same time as many countries and localities are attempting to 
shore up such sovereignty through efforts to control the flow and 
movement of migrants and to police the physical and symbolic spaces of 
borders, communication technologies and commerce have facilitated the 
flow of culture, goods, and forms of community across these borders. 
These flows potentially erode some of the intellectual and symbolic 
resources typically used to construct and maintain state sovereignty. 
Additionally, alternative notions of citizenship and belonging that 
hinge less on state-based political rights and more on consumption 
practices, media culture, and access to goods have become part of 
popular discourse and culture. Arguably, media culture and communication 
play key roles in the formation and circulation of these alternative 
ideas of citizenship and community. These more diffuse cultural 
connections pull in a different direction than state efforts to control 
borders, migrants, and citizenship. The roundtable seeks to explore this 
tension and the contribution that communication scholarship can make to 
discussions of sovereignty and citizenship in popular discourse and 
sites of legal struggle. Topics that proposal might address include, but 
are not limited to:

• The role of communication and popular/media culture in conceptions of 
post-sovereignty and in cosmopolitan challenges to territorially-bound 
notions of sovereignty
• Examples in which ideas and practices of cultural citizenship 
articulates alternative forms of solidarity or sovereignty to compete 
with territorial ideas of sovereignty
• Comparisons of communication, citizenship and borders within liberal 
political regimes and non-liberal political regimes
• Examination of cultural policy and communication infrastructures in 
terms of sovereignty and citizenship
• The ethical bases for contemporary regimes of citizenship and 
sovereignty and the political and legal potentials of alternative 
ethical groundings
• Programs for how communication and media scholarship, especially in 
areas such as cultural citizenship, hybridity, and cosmopolitan ethics, 
can become tools for tearing down walls, symbolic, legal or physical
• Specific tensions or places of contact between ideas and practices of 
cultural citizenship with state practices of sovereignty
• Explorations of how territoriality and sovereignty define 
communication/media production, policy, and consumption
• Consideration of what place traditional political ideas of sovereignty 
(and the definitions and distributions of citizenship that flow from it) 
should have in our research agendas

The Citizenship, Culture, and Sovereignty roundtable is part of the 
broader, inter-division pre-conference, Arizona and Beyond. In light of 
the location of the 2012 conference in Arizona, the Arizona and Beyond 
pre-conference brings together a broad cross section of ICA divisions to 
explore the political, cultural, ethical, and theoretical issues raised 
by state efforts to control migrants and borders. The roundtable will 
contribute to the pre-conference through exploring the cultural and 
communicative underpinnings and implications of the conceptual apparatus 
of border and migrant control, sovereignty, and through examination of 
alternative bases of political autonomy and solidarity. Culture and 
communication are key bases of solidarity, community, and new practices 
of autonomy and citizenship; as such, they can be productive starting 
points for re-thinking the foundations and practices of border control.

The panel will consist of 4 invited respondents and 4 respondents to 
this open call. The format is geared toward discussion and productive 
exchange, following the Flow conference format. Each panelist will be 
asked to circulate a short position paper to participants and moderators 
beforehand and will have 5 minutes to introduce their argument. 
Panelists will then be invited to discuss points of connection and 
dissent among the position statements before the panel is opened up for 
discussion with the room.

Non-U.S. focused submissions are encouraged. Submissions for this open 
call should consist at this stage of a title and abstract (maximum 300 
words). Please send these to Jennifer Petersen at (jenp /at/ virginia.edu) by 
Nov. 30, 2011.