Fourth ACSS Conference
Call for Papers
Fourth Conference of the Arab Council for the Social Sciences
“Power, Borders and Ecologies in Arab Societies: Practices and Imaginaries”
April 12-14, 2019 | Beirut, Lebanon
Deadline for submission of paper proposals: September 10, 2018
The Arab Council for the Social Sciences is pleased to announce its fourth conference, titled “Power, Borders and Ecologies in Arab Societies: Practices and Imaginaries” to be held in Beirut, Lebanon on April 12-14, 2019. Papers will be selected based on two criteria:
The extent to which they engage seriously with the aim of the conference to question prevailing concepts and theories in the social sciences generally, and those pertaining to the Arab region particularly.
The theoretical and empirical depth of the paper and the focus on innovative cases and locations.
The conference is open to papers from all social science and allied disciplines and to scholars anywhere in the world. Researchers from the Arab region, whether currently resident in or outside the region, are particularly encouraged to apply. Applicants must hold at least an MA degree and be actively engaged in social science research. Papers may examine contemporary or historical phenomena. Comparative, cross-regional and global perspectives are particularly encouraged.
The Theme
Recent years have seen tremendous flux and change in the Arab region, both within its constituent states as well as in terms of inter-state and regional dynamics. Some states are being split apart and new borders and boundaries are being established, whereas other borders are becoming more permeable especially due to forced displacement and refugee movements. Struggles for regional influence are disrupting existing territorial arrangements and generating complex patterns in the context of global power interventions that are affecting and shaping peoples’ lives at every level. In addition, the unprecedentedscale of human impact on nature needs to be examined in the context of the global environmental crisis. This involves massive reorganization of populations, institutions and even of Earth strata. The conference will examine these new ecologies (political, economic, urban, geographical, social and cultural) both in terms of the practices of multiple actors on the ground as well as through the imaginaries that represent, legitimize and contest them.
Examining these questions requires conceptual innovation, empirical investigation, long historical time frames, comparative approaches and cultural critique. Social science knowledge production itself needs to be investigated: How are issues of power, borders and ecologies understood and discussed in both academic and public spheres? How does the work of Arab scholars compare, converge with or diverge from the work of scholars working in the global north and other parts of the global south? Finally, and importantly, what imaginations of Arab futures are emerging, whether dystopic or phantasmal, through writing, arts and other forms of representation?
The Fourth ACSS Conference will be organized around the following three major axes:
1) Power, Actors and the Political
This track focuses on various forms of power (political, economic, social, religious and cultural) that shape and reproduce Arab societies. What are the features of current regional power struggles and how do they intersect with the internal social, political and economic dynamics of different states? How can we interrogate the imaginaries informing such powerful processes and ask how they materially and symbolically translate power into practices and into change on the ground? What are the politics of scale that link the body, community, state, the national, the regional and the transnational?
The following topics may be addressed under this theme:
Actors: Multiple actors are negotiating, elaborating, implementing or obstructing change on the ground. How do actors interact with each other, and under which conditions do these interactions induce collective action or, conversely, lead to splintering and conflict? How is the political re-configured through the actions of a range of actors—formal and informal, groups and individuals—across scales and geographies? What are the repertoires of action that actors mobilize, at what times, in what places, and according to which strategies? How do they legitimize these actions and how are they held accountable, if at all, by their constituencies?
Policies: In any location, field or state, the elaboration and implementation of policies includes governmental actors (ministries, public agencies), elected actors (local and regional governments, parliamentarians), international actors (UN bodies, INGOs), professional actors (syndicates, industrialists), private sector actors (banks, firms, universities), civil society actors (NGOs, CBOs), experts and consultants, and others. Rarely is the process of policy-making rational or linear. Rather it is much more about muddling-through antagonisms and tensions, leading to blockages, delays and conflicts, but also to negotiations and bargaining. Another aspect of policy-making is its normative bias. Thus policies often address what should happen, rather than what actually is happening. Accordingly, policy analysis often remains confined to a normative, technical sphere, and consciously avoids an investigation of actual social, economic and urban practices and experiences— which are said to be too political. By whom, how, why, where and for whom are policies elaborated and implemented? Which governance (dis)continuities can be identified, and how do these vary across time and place? How can we understand the political through processes of policy making?
Publics: An array of publics are involved and impacted by power, policies and their agents. This includes citizens, sojourners, refugees, and other forms of collectivities. People are often categorized according to gender, sexuality, age, income, education, profession, race, sect, geography, etc. In other words, power always abstracts and homogenizes publics into end-users or beneficiaries, insufficiently taking into consideration their differentiated agency, thus often yielding to exclusions and inadequate policies. How do diverse actors and different sets of policies represent various publics, and impact their everyday lives? How do these publics navigate these representations and negotiate their impacts?
2) Borders, Migrations and Displacement
The modern history of the Arab region is simultaneously one of establishing new borders of migration and displacement, whether through wars, economic policies, labor market forces or large infrastructural projects. While this phenomenon is not new, the past decades have pushed it to a level that is unprecedented in scale, violence and longevity. In addition, environmental degradation and climate change are also contributing to further displacement of populations and of modes of livelihood. Furthermore, these processes are leading to the construction of vast systems of governance and surveillance to control the movement of undesirable persons along national, ethnic, sectarian, and class boundaries whose consequences are yet to be seen.
Some of the possible thematic sets of questions that suggest themselves when broadening our conceptualization of migration and displacement include the following:
Borders and Displacement: In the last century displacement has been formative in the making of Arab societies from the drawing of maps as we know them today and the forming of new borders by colonial superpowers to subsequent resistance to the consolidation of nation state identities. This process also created “borders” between nations, minorities and sects within nations. Are the new waves of migration and displacement redrawing the map of the region? Are we seeing the formation of new maps and new borders? If we take borders in more figurative ways as mobile and not fixed territories, how are the new territories being redrawn? And how are maps of knowledge being redrawn? How are waves of displacement, breaking mental borders or reinforcing new ones amongst different communities?
Power: Is displacement the central characteristic of contemporary Arab societies subsuming all other issues? Is migration and displacement an effect of power relations of exclusion? How is it also shaped by struggles for inclusion and/or resettlement? How does state and global regulation of migration affect population movements and subsequent settlement patterns? Is a universal humanitarian framework sufficient to address the effects of displacement, or is a particularistic approach grounded in regionally specific set of processes more productive? What kind of surveillance and controls are being put in place in the name of humanitarianism and what kinds of futures are being constructed through these systems (camps, resettlement schemes, reconstruction plans)?
Everyday Experiences of Migration and Displacement: How can social scientists make the connections between the individual experiences and the collective experiences of displacement? How do people express their sense of being displaced, how does displacement transform people and how do they transform the experience of being displaced itself?
3) Ecologies, Societies and Violence
This theme pushes us to explore political ecologies that are generative and dynamic even in ongoing conditions of devastation and fragmentation. Political ecology brings together analytically the various strands of the environmental and the political. It questions the separation of the “natural,” the “social” and the “political,” emphasizing instead the interrelationships between these domains. Poverty, marginality, inequality, racial and gender discrimination are all instantiations of violent structural conditions that are too often construed as “natural” environments. Here we seek on the one hand to destabilize the naturalized complacency of such environments, and on the other to explore the possibilities and dimensions of life and sociality in violent environments like war-zones, militarized landscapes, occupied places, spaces of intensive capitalist exploitation and extraction, degraded places and polluted polities in an era of impending climactic catastrophe.
In an Arab region overburdened by a plethora of violent environments, this theme seeks papers that touch on some of the following:
Landscape and Power: Militarized, polluted, fragmented, divided, degraded, protected, colonized, exploited landscapes embody various configurations of power that express themselves spatially, temporally, affectively and materially. How can Landscape Thinking that is non-reductive and heterogeneous open up fresh avenues of understanding stale concepts and spaces by pushing us to grasp new configurations? How is power immanent in landscape? Environment, environs, here is that which surrounds, a gathering, assemblage of the heterogeneous elements that vitally (be)come together, matter, coalesce in certain times and places: material, social, human, non-human, “natural,” and human-made, sentient and otherwise.
Resistance and War: War is an environment that many contend with and live with in the Arab region. How do they do so? “Steadfastness” expresses the ability to remain despite the difficulties of war, occupation and other violent conditions and formations. How is steadfastness expressed by the subjects of oppressive and destructive forms of violence that foregrounds their everyday struggle to pursue their lifeways without succumbing to death or displacement? What are the modalities of resistance taken up by actors opposing oppressive and violent forms of power, including: guerrillas, freedom-fighters, revolutionaries, resistors, activists?
Politics and Pollution: Garbage crises, stinking politics, sewage seas, deadly natural or industrial disasters are among the various manifestations of violent and violated environments that we commonly encounter. Polluted environments are simultaneously material and metaphorical, poisoned worlds and words pertaining both to the “natural” world and socio-political, reverberating and rupturing across those heterogeneous yet entangled fields. What is the nature of these entanglements and how can we think in new ways about the political and the social when we widen the scope to include more-than-human actors and forces?
Application Instructions
The ACSS invites proposals for individual paper presentations or for organized panels. The Conference Planning Committee will review all applications and select the final list of presenters.
We strongly encourage applications in Arabic, however proposals may be submitted in Arabic, English or French and should be in the language of the planned paper and presentation. Simultaneous translation will be available at the conference.
1) Individual Applicants
To submit a paper proposal, please create an account and a Profile Page on the ACSS Applications Platform, then apply to the Conference by filling out the online application form for the Fourth ACSS Conference, including an abstract of 1 page (or approximately 500 words). See this page for guidelines on how to write a successful abstract.
Please note that applicants can submit a co-authored paper proposal. However, if selected for inclusion in the conference, the ACSS can only guarantee financial support for the primary author. The ACSS will decide if it is possible to provide support for a second author on a case-by-case basis after the selection decisions have been announced.
To submit an individual application, click here.
2) Organized Panels
The ACSS strongly encourages individuals or research institutions to submit an organized panel on the themes of the conference. Each panel should include 3-4 papers and the panel organizer should also present a paper in the panel.
To submit a panel proposal, please create an account and a Profile Page on the ACSS Applications Platform, then apply to the Conference by filling out the online application form for the Fourth ACSS Conference, including an abstract of 1 page (or approximately 500 words).
To submit a proposal for an organized panel, click here.
Important Dates
The deadline for submissions is September 10, 2018. Selection decisions are announced by October 10, 2018.
Selected participants are required to submit their completed papers by February 10, 2019. If the paper is not received by this deadline, the participant will be removed from the conference program.
Paper Presentations and Publishing
All conference abstracts will be posted on the ACSS website and made publicly available. Paper presenters may be asked to revise their abstracts for posting. In addition, the full conference papers will be made available to all the conference participants on a password-protected webpage or Dropbox as well as on a USB distributed at the conference.
After the conference, the ACSS may invite a number of papers for inclusion in one or more publications, which may include translation of the paper into different languages. Individuals are free to accept or decline to take part in these planned publications.
Conference presentations should be 15-20 minutes per paper and may be presented in Arabic, English or French. Simultaneous translation from English and French into Arabic and from Arabic to English will be provided. The conference site will be A/V equipped. Additional details on the composition of individual panels will be available after selection decisions are announced on October 10, 2018.
Expenses
Paper presenters based in the Arab region will be covered fully for economy-class travel and accommodation costs. The ACSS will provide up to four nights’ accommodations, based on flight availability and travel itineraries. Presenters based outside the region will be considered for travel and accommodation funding on a case-by-case basis.
If not selected to present a paper at the conference, please note that applicants are encouraged to register to attend the conference, which will be open to the public.
Questions? Please contact: kaouk [at] theacss.org.