[ecrea] CFP-Book-Informal Urban Street Markets

Editors: Kirsten Seale (RMIT University, Melbourne) and Clifton Evers (University of Nottingham Ningbo, China)

Informal urban street markets are made up of people buying and selling, fabrics and DVDs, cash moving from pocket to hand to pocket to hand. Food stall sellers sweat over open stoves. Illegal taxis compete for the business of the potential customer waving her hand in the air. Fishmongers scale and slice farmed fish on blood-soaked chopping boards. An informal banking operation operates discreetly over a wooden box of apples. Plastic products of all shapes and sizes from all over the world sit in stacks. A refugee who has just arrived in the country wanders through the stalls in the hope of hearing their own language.

Informal urban street markets coalesce around innumerable lines of living, working, representing and imagining. In the process these are made and make themselves. This book pays attention to what takes place in these informal urban street markets. We reflect on new modes of becoming that emerge from them: economic, subjective, institutional, spatial, emotional, bodily, or symbolic.

How do encounters in informal urban street markets, fleeting or sustained, transform habitus and cultural capital, bodies, belonging, economics, identities, consumption and production, and material culture? What can these informal urban street markets and the people who populate them teach us? Are there emergent cultural, economic, political, social, technical and environmental possibilities they can enable us to register? Do informal urban street markets generate solutions that can have a collective impact at the societal level? This mapping, in turn, enables analyses of how relations of power interplay with all of these (Wise and Velayutham, 2009).

This book will identify ways to offer support to these sites of becoming and the people who energize them in the face of pressure from hegemonic demands and expectations. We ask is it possible to awaken and support different (non-capitalist?) economic possibilities, as well as locate what we can learn from becomings that require us to rethink how we ‘deal with oneself, other people, and things’ (Spinosa, Flores and Dreyfus, 1997).

We encourage chapters that represent a variety of disciplinary perspectives and analytical approaches. Examples of topics that fall into the scope of this book include but are not limited to, informal urban street markets and

• Conditions of emergence, stability, transformation and disappearance
• Regulation at the local, national and global levels
• Hegemonic models of production and consumption
• The network society: global flows, frictions and politics in local-global commodities
• Affective and embodied networks and connections
• Emotion
• The bio-cultural
• The human/animal
• Migration and everyday multiculturalism
• Reconfigurations of “the local”, “the regional”, and “the national”
• Identity – ethnicity, dis/ability, gender, sexuality, youth, etc.
• Technological, economic and/or financial innovation
• Environmental sustainability
• Waste, appropriation and renewal
• Architecture and the built environment
• Space and/or place
• Media

This edited collection follows upon the successful workshop “Street Markets: Micro-economics, sustainability, placemaking, and cultural identity”  held in Shanghai, China in 2011. The workshop was organized by Clifton Evers, Kirsten Seale, Stephanie Hemelryk Donald, Maurizio Marinelli, Sophie Watson, Elspeth Probyn, Dunfu Zhang and Lili Hernandez.

Proposals should be 500 words and provide a clear indication of what the chapter will be about. Proposals should be submitted by email to both the editors ((clifton.evers /at/ nottingham.edu.cn) and (kirsten.seale /at/ rmit.edu.au)). Mention explicitly in the email that your submission is intended for this edited collection. The proposals will be evaluated for relevance to the themes and guidance will be given. All submissions should be in .doc format. Please also include a short bio.

Deadline for proposals: April 6, 2012

Prior enquiries are also welcome.

References:
Spinosa, C., F. Flores, and H.L. Dreyfus. 1997. Disclosing New Worlds: Entrpreneurship, Democratic Action, and the Cultivation of Solidarity. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.
Wise, A. and Velayutham, S. 2009. Everyday Multiculturalism. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

--Dr Clifton Evers

Lecturer in Cultural and Media Studies
PhD Programme Director
Institute for Creative and Digital Cultures
Division of International Communications
Room AB 425
University of Nottingham
199 Taikang East Road
Ningbo, 315100.
Zhejiang Province,
China
T. +86 18621672317
www.nottingham.edu.cn



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