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[ecrea] Arizona ICA Preconference CFP

Tue Oct 04 17:29:17 GMT 2011



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.


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