WOMEN’S STUDIES

QUARTERLY

is pleased to announce the Call for Papers for its Spring 2019 Special Issue:

ASIAN DIASPORAS

 Guest Editors: Lili Shi, Kingsborough Community College-CUNY and Yadira Perez Hazel, University of Melbourne

Asian diasporas are gendering spaces and times that intertwine stories of race, transnationalism, citizenship, and postcoloniality. We contend that Asia is not only a geographic term, but also a comparative one. It is the collective sum of heterogeneous racial, regional, transhistorical and transnational politics that transcends bodies and identities of “Asia” across Global South and North as well as global mediascape. We also embrace an expansive notion of diaspora, one that is beyond the mere causal result of travel and migration that reifies the binary of home and settlement that subsequently “privileges the mobility of masculine subjects” (Campt, T. & Thomas, D. A., 2008, p.2). We propose Asian diasporas as scattered communities, identities and relationships that are conditioned by, while influencing and transforming, global struggles of nation, empire, postcoloniality, transnationality and respective hegemonies.

 This special issue aims to curate essays that theorize and narrate Asian diasporas through feminist frameworks. We invite contributors to foreground gender as they engage conceptually with Asian diasporas as spaces of un-unified and uneven gendering and queering experiences, identities, histories and hegemonies, compelling individuals to endlessly translate multiple forces into daily interactions (Brah, 1996; Hall, 1996; Ang, 2001; Edwards, 2003; Grewal, 2005; Campt, 2004; Gopinath, 2005; Campt & Thomas, 2008, Atay 2015).  What are the local and global gendering moments in Asian diasporic transnationalism? How do we investigate “politics of destination” (Chu, 2010) in the often-described fluid movement of Asian diasporas? What unique struggles do Asian diasporas encounter as a historically feminized group in colonialist discourse? In what light should we study Asian diasporas beyond the Global North’s imaginaries of “Asia” and its related gender identities, localities, populations, and bodies?

 This call also encourages contributors to examine this issue’s boundary-marking concepts of Asian-ness, diasporic-ness, woman-ness and queerness within various grounded contexts and times. For example, how does gender intersect with the politics of belonging in racialized immigrant communities? How do we theorize intra-diasporic differences? What are the comparative or differing histories and moments that Asian diasporas encounter with those of other diasporas, other marginalized groups, against the dominant (American-centric) black-and-white racial relationships? How are Asian diasporic women and queer affected by global scripts of patriarchy, neoliberalism, transnational capitalism, and the responding logics of gender, race, labor, and family?

We especially welcome contributions that engage Asian diaspora beyond the Americas, beyond U.S. notions of race and racial experience, and diasporas across centers of Global North within Asia.

We invite essays on, yet not limited to, the following topics:

·      Diasporic Asian gender identities and belonging

·      Non-binary manifestations and creations of Asian diasporas

·      Concepts, ideologies and practices of masculinity/femininity/gender hegemonies  among Asian diasporic communities

·      Queer Asian diasporas and identities

·      Asian diasporas in cyberspace

·      Disabilities in Asian Diasporas

·      Women in faith-based diasporic Asian communities

·      Asian diaspora women’s labor

·      Asian diaspora and feminist autoethnographies

·      Gender, nation, and class in Asian diasporic contexts

·      Neoliberalism and gender in Asian diasporas

·      Feminine health in Asian diasporas

·      Gender and poverty in Asian diaspora

·      Media consumption/representation of Asian diasporic women and queer communities

·      Asian diasporic community organizing

·      Asian feminist diasporic art

·      Asian diasporic families (gender relations)

·      Diasporic youth and parenting

·      Decolonializing feminisms among Asian diasporas

• State policies, citizenships, public practices, and local activisms of Asian diasporas across gendered expressions
• Circuits of migration, detention, exile, incarceration, deportation, and enslavement
• Practices, narratives of Asian Diaspora outside and/or within “Asia”

Scholarly articles and inquiries should be sent to guest issue editors Lili Shi and Yadira Perez Hazel at AsianDiasporasWSQ@gmail.com. We will give priority consideration to submissions received by March 1, 2018. Please send complete articles, not abstracts. Submissions should not exceed 6,360 words (including abstract, keywords, un-embedded notes and works cited) and should comply with the formatting guidelines at www.feministpress.org/submission-guidelines. We will give priority consideration to submissions received by March 1, 2018. Please send complete articles, not abstracts. Submissions should not exceed 6,360 words (including abstract, keywords, un-embedded notes and works cited) and should comply with the formatting guidelines at

We do not accept work that has been previously published. Please provide all contact information in the body of the e-mail.

Poetry submissions should be sent to WSQ’s poetry editor Patricia Smith at WSQpoetry@gmail.com by March 1, 2018. Please review previous issues of WSQ to see what type of submissions we prefer before submitting poems. Please note that poetry submissions may be held for six months or longer. Simultaneous submissions are acceptable if the poetry editor is notified immediately of acceptance elsewhere. We do not accept work that has been previously published. Please paste poetry submissions into the body of the e-mail along with all contact information.

Fiction, essay, memoir, and translation submissions between 2000-2500 words should be sent to WSQ’s fiction/nonfiction editor, Rosalie Morales Kearns, at WSQCreativeProse@gmail.com by March 1, 2018. Please review previous issues of WSQ to see what type of submissions we prefer before submitting prose. Please note that prose submissions may be held for six months or longer. Simultaneous submissions are acceptable if the prose editor is notified immediately of acceptance elsewhere. We do not accept work that has been previously published. Please provide all contact information in the body of the e-mail.

ABOUT WSQ: Since 1972, WSQ has been an interdisciplinary forum for the exchange of emerging perspectives on women, gender, and sexu­ality. Its peer-reviewed interdisciplinary thematic issues focus on such topics as Precarious Work, At Sea, Solidarity, Queer Methods, Child, Activisms, The Global and the Intimate, Trans-,The Sexual Body, and Mother, combining legal, queer, cultural, technological, and historical work to present the most exciting new scholarship, fiction, creative nonfiction, poetry, book reviews, and visual arts on ideas that engage popular and academic readers alike. WSQ is edited by Jillian Báez (College of Staten Island-CUNY) and Natalie Havlin (LaGuardia Community College-CUNY) and published by the Feminist Press at the City University of New York. Visit http://www.feministpress.org/wsq.

CfP POLLEN 2018:

 

From performativity to hybridization: exploring theory-practice entanglements in (so-called) market-based environmental initiatives

POLLEN18: Political Ecology, the Green Economy, and Alternative Sustainabilities

Oslo, Norway

June 20-22, 2018

 

ABSTRACT DEADLINE: December 6, 2017

Session organizers: Catherine Windey (University of Antwerp), Vijay Kolinjivadi (Université du Québec en Outaouais), Gert Van Hecken (University of Antwerp), and Elizabeth Shapiro-Garza (Duke University)

 

Over the last two decades, market-based instruments (MBIs) for nature conservation have become increasingly prominent in environmental and development policy discourse as a so-called win-win solution. While there is no consensual definition of MBIs and they encompasses heterogeneous types of programmes that do not always use markets in their conception and implementation, a utilitarian rationale and the use of financial incentives remain central elements of their design (Pirard, 2012). Therefore, beyond the material outcomes of MBIs and regardless of actual commodification or marketization processes taking place, much of the critical scholarship on MBIs denounces this overarching rationale as part of a hegemonic neoliberal governmentality that primarily serves the capitalist agenda. Accordingly, this form of environmental management would lead to a detrimental modification of socio-ecological relations through the promotion of productivist/individualistic socio-cultural attitudes towards the environment at the cost of more intrinsic motivations (e.g. Brockington and Duffy, 2010; Büscher et al., 2012; Castree, 2003; Corbera, 2012; Fletcher and Büscher, 2017; McAfee, 2012; Sullivan, 2006; Van Hecken and Bastiaensen, 2010). At the same time, an increasing number of empirical studies have also shown precisely how these dominant narratives behind MBIs are constructed, contested and (re)negotiated at multiple levels (e.g. Benjaminsen, 2014; Büscher, 2014; den Besten et al., 2013; Evans et al., 2014; Leggett and Lovell, 2012; McElwee, 2014; Milne and Adams, 2012; Pasgaard, 2015; Shapiro-Garza, 2013a, 2013b; Van Hecken et al. 2015a). In fact, these models do not necessarily unfold on the ground as intended and rather result in a hybridization between different worldviews, everyday practices and ways of valuing ‘nature’ through actors’ agency and power relationships (Cleaver, 2012; Van Hecken et al., 2015b).

While it is important to critically examine the ideologies and power structures underlying MBIs along with micro scale analysis (e.g. Fletcher & Büscher, 2017), we argue that these debates often remain somewhat trapped within binary frames between the ‘global’ and the ‘local’, ‘market’ and ‘no market’, ‘capitalist’ and ‘non-capitalist’, ‘resistance’ and ‘consent’, that still convey the idea of an imposition of the global neoliberal/capitalist economy to powerless non-capitalist local communities and agents (Gibson-Graham, 2002; Hart, 2006). Individual agents and communities hence appear as a “site of economic impact and never as a constituent of the economic” (St Martin, 2006: 182) which conveys the idea that there is an a priori structural power, i.e. neoliberalism, and an a posteriori agency/actor that is always the site of its hegemonic impact. Through this lens, the tendency is to dismiss theory-practice entanglements and various human-nature relationalities and discursive formations that continuously emerge, but which fall outside of these dialectic ontologies, hence paradoxically risking reinforcing a neoliberal performative act “that limits our political imaginations and sense of agency” (Burke and Shear, 2014: 129; Kolinjivadi et al., 2017). Crucially, these outcomes are not framed as alternatives in response to an imposition by the hegemonic tendencies of neoliberalism or a capitalist economy. Instead, they emerge as theory-practice entanglements, consciously or unconsciously, in relation to a muddle of ideologies, social norms, power relations, actors’ agencies, path dependencies and geographic scales (Van Hecken et al., 2017).

To further challenge conventional discursive polarizations and to enlighten and rethink diverse identities and practices (Gibson-Graham, 2002), we believe that the analysis of how so-called MBIs are formed and then enact, are (re)informed and contested in interaction with hybrid socio-ecological configurations is a crucial area of exploration. In other words, examining these programmes in praxis requires a stronger relational understanding of humans-in-nature and nature-in-humanity in order to ground MBI design and implementation within historical and often unruly geographical conditions. We are therefore interested in bringing together a collection of presentations that look at the dynamic processes of MBIs’ (re)configuration that can potentially shape the formation of a new episteme. We thus invite conceptual, theoretical and empirical contributions that consider but are not limited to the topics below:

– ‘Politics of knowledge’: performativity of policy and academic discourses on MBIs; theory-practice entanglements; how discourses are constructed and translated into practice;

– Diverse and historically-situated values, institutions, agencies, knowledge practices, skills and traditions related to natural resources management and how they interact with MBIs’ as narrative and practice;

– Dynamics of power (e.g. ‘power-knowledge’, access and use of natural resources, etc.), role of the State and unruly green governmentalities  surrounding MBIs;

– Going beyond capital-logics as imposed from above: contingent human-nature histories as debunking neoliberalism’s so-called “success”.

Please send abstracts of no more than 300 words to catherine.windey@uantwerpen.be before 6 December 2017. Feel free to contact us should you have any questions or ideas about this session. If accepted to this paper session, applicants will still need to register through the POLLEN website.

 

References

Benjaminsen, G. 2014. Between Resistance and Consent: Project–Village Relationships When Introducing REDD+ in Zanzibar. Forum for Development Studies, 41, 377-398.

Brockington, D., and Duffy, R. 2010. Capitalism and Conservation: The Production and Reproduction of Biodiversity Conservation. Antipode 42(3), 469-484.

Büscher, B. 2012. Payments for ecosystem services as neoliberal conservation: (Reinterpreting) evidence from the Maloti-Drakensberg, South Africa. Conservation & Society, 10, 29-41.

Büscher, B., Sullivan, S., Neves, K., Igoe, J. & Brockington, D. 2012. Towards a Synthesized Critique of Neoliberal Biodiversity Conservation. Capitalism Nature Socialism, 23, 4-30.

Büscher, B. 2014. Selling Success: Constructing Value in Conservation and Development. World Development, 57, 79-90.

Burke, B. & Shear, B. 2014. Introduction: engaged scholarship for non-capitalist political ecologies. Journal of Political Ecology, 21, 127-144.

Castree, N. 2003. Commodifying what nature? Progress in Human Geography, 27, 273-297.

Cleaver, F. 2012. Development as Bricolage. London: Earthscan.

Corbera, E. 2012. Problematizing REDD+ as an experiment in payments for ecosystem services. Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability, 4, 612-619.

den Besten, J. W., Arts, B. & Verkooijen, P. 2014. The evolution of REDD+: An analysis of discursive-institutional dynamics. Environmental Science & Policy, 35, 40-48.

Evans, K., Murphy, L. & de Jong, W. 2014. Global versus local narratives of REDD: A case study from Peru’s Amazon. Environmental Science & Policy, 35, 98-108.

Fletcher, R., Büscher, B., 2017. The PES Conceit: Revisiting the Relationship between Payments for Environmental Services and Neoliberal Conservation. Ecological Economics 132, 224-231.

Gibson-Graham, J. K. 2002. Beyond Global Vs. Local: Economic Politics Outside the Binary Frame. In: Herod, A. & Wright, M. (eds.) Geographies of Power: Placing Scale. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers.

Hart, G. 2006. Denaturalizing Dispossession: Critical Ethnography in the Age of Resurgent Imperialism. Antipode, 38, 977-1004.

Kolinjivadi, V., Van Hecken, G., Vela Almeida, D., Kosoy, N., Dupras, J., 2017. Neoliberal performatives and the “making” of payments for ecosystem services (PES). Forthcoming in Progress in Human Geography. DOI: 10.1177/0309132517735707.

Leggett, M. & Lovell, H. 2012. Community perceptions of REDD+: a case study from Papua New Guinea. Climate Policy, 12, 115-134.

McAfee, K. & Shapiro, E. N. 2010. Payments for Ecosystem Services in Mexico: Nature, Neoliberalism, Social Movements, and the State. Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 100, 579-599.

McElwee, P., Nghiem, T., Le, H., Vu, H., Tran, N., 2014. Payments for environmental services and contested neoliberalisation in developing countries: A case study from Vietnam. Journal of Rural Studies 36, 423-440.

Milne, S. & Adams, B. 2012. Market Masquerades: Uncovering the Politics of Community-level Payments for Environmental Services in Cambodia. Development and Change, 43, 133-158.

Pasgaard, M. (2015). Lost in translation? How project actors shape REDD+ policy and outcomes in Cambodia. Asia Pacific Viewpoint, 56(1), 111-127.

Pirard, R., 2012. Market-based instruments for biodiversity and ecosystem services: A lexicon. Environmental Science and Policy 19-20, 59-68.

Shapiro-Garza, E., 2013a. Contesting the market-based nature of Mexico’s national payments for ecosystem services programs: Four sites of articulation and hybridization. Geoforum 46, 5-15.

Shapiro-Garza, E., 2013b. Contesting market-based conservation: Payments for ecosystem services as a surface of engagement for rural social movements in Mexico. Human Geography 6(1), 134-150.

St Martin, K. 2006. The impact of “community” on fisheries management in the US Northeast. Geoforum, 37, 169-184.

Sullivan, S., 2006. Elephant in the room? Problematising ‘new’ (neoliberal) biodiversity conservation. Forum for Development Studies 33(1), 105-135.

Van Hecken, G. & Bastiaensen, J. 2010. Payments for Ecosystem Services in Nicaragua: Do Market-based Approaches Work? Development and Change, 41, 421-444.

Van Hecken, G., Bastiaensen, J., Huybrechs, F., 2015a. What’s in a name? Epistemic perspectives and Payments for Ecosystem Services policies in Nicaragua. Geoforum 63, 55-66.

Van Hecken, G., Bastiaensen, J. & Windey, C. 2015b. Towards a power-sensitive and socially-informed analysis of payments for ecosystem services (PES): Addressing the gaps in the current debate. Ecological Economics, 120, 117-125.

Van Hecken, G., Kolinjivadi, V., Windey, C., McElwee, P., Shapiro-Garza, E., Huybrechs, F., & Bastiaensen, J., 2017. Silencing Agency in Payments for Ecosystem Services (PES) by Essentializing a Neoliberal ‘Monster’ Into Being: A Response to Fletcher & Büscher’s ‘PES Conceit’. Forthcoming in Ecological Economics. doi:https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ecolecon.2017.10.023.