Call for papers for the AAG annual meeting, San Francisco, March 29 – April 2, 2016
Locating Humanitarian Violence: Persistence, Circulation, Emergence
Organisers: Andrew Merrill, Ben Butler and Killian McCormack (University of Toronto)
Although grounded in an ostensible universal morality and frequently couched in the therapeutic rhetoric of human rights and security, a hierarchy of life underpins humanitarian responses and practices, with different lives and bodies valued over others in a broader regime of biopolitical regulation. Humanitarian violence requires the mobilization and intersection of a variety of knowledges, logics, infrastructures and bodies both beyond and within traditional studies of security and militarism. This session is interested in contemporary perspectives, particularly those informed by feminist, queer and post-colonial scholarships, interrogating the materialities, embodiments, epistemic frames and ideologies that are deployed and circulated in the production of humanitarian violence. We invite papers that challenge the assumptions and presuppositions of humanitarian discourse, and that confront the material and epistemic violence that is obscured through invocations of humanitarianism. Please submit abstracts of no more than 300 words to Andrew Merrill (andrew.merrill@mail.utoronto.
Possible paper topics include:
– Relocating Humanitarian Crises and Militarised Response to the Global North
– Refugees, Conflict and the Site of Humanitarianism
– Worlding Humanitarian Violence
– Natural Disaster, Militarised Response and Displacement
– Transnational Circulations of Populations and the Logistics of Violence
– Seeking Humanitarian Response
– Suffering, Ethics and Humanitarianism
– Geoeconomics of Humanitarian Response
– Reconstruction and the Consequences of Humanitarian Violence
– Humanitarian War and State Racism
– Defining Humanitarian Crises (e.g., Canadian First Nations Reserves, Racialized Ghettoes)
– War and Humanitarianism/War as Humanitarian
– Affect, Humanitarianism and the Suffering Body
– Settler Colonialism and the Production of the Humanitarian Subject
– Resisting Militarism and Humanitarian Violence
– Law and Humanitarianism
Keywords:
- Bodies
- Embodiment
- Militarism
- Materiality
- Humanitarianism
- War
- History
- Reconstruction
- Colonialism
- Race
- Security
- Development
- Affect
- Disaster/Crisis
- Geopolitics
- Geoeconomics
- Queer Theory
- Feminist Theory