From: Gerald Ronning, [mailto]gronning@alb.edu[/mailto]
The Labor Network of the Social Science History Association invites papers and panels sessions for its 2010 Annual Meeting to be held in Chicago from November 18-21.
The 2010 Program Committee seeks panel proposals that will focus on Power and Politics. Power is a foundational concept in history and the social sciences, and just as clearly a contested one. Traditionally, the understanding of power as the capacity to enact one's will against resistance and images of the coercive, central state apparatus held sway, and these are still compelling visions. More recently, we have seen the emergence of a rather different conception of power as a diffuse set of forces, at work in the practices of everyday life, which may entangle actors in their own subjection. Here, the analysis of power has expanded to include the constitution of domination outside the formal polity, in forms of inequality and difference such as race, gender, or sexuality, or in terms of capillary processes working through classification systems, therapeutic discourses, and other technologies of regulation. Similarly, notions of politics and the political are debated. Some focus on collective practices, formal and informal, directed at states, while others stress the ways in which "the personal is political," or examine individual or smallscale acts of compliance, resistance or inauguration that may be carried into the polity. And which issues and relations are considered political is historically specific. Power and politics, then, have many faces, and we may trace their institutionalization in forms of rule and the formation of subjects in a broad array of spatial, national and historical contexts.
More information and an electronic submission form can be found at [url]http://www.ssha.org/[/url]. Complete panels, roundtables, and book sessions are welcomed, of course, but the Labor Network Co-Chairs are happy to accept single papers and have had success putting together diverse yet compelling and coherent panels in the past.
Thanks for your consideration!
Gerald Ronning
SSHA Labor Network Co-Chair
History Department
Albright College
13th and Bern Streets
Reading, PA 19612
610-921-7820