CALL FOR ABSTRACTS
PANEL: WORLD SEMIOTICS, ANTHROPOLOGY, CULTURAL AND AREA STUDIES, Beyond Geopolitics
Abstract
The linguistic turn in the 1960s gave rise to a new exploration and appreciation of space (social, symbolic, imagined etc.). Area Studies was already an established common field of interest between colonial powers and academia at the same time. In the era that followed the crisis of representation in Anthropology and Cultural Studies, the examination of space, culture, and borders became a prominent field for studying and deconstructing world politics.
Drawing on the afore-mentioned genealogy, the panel will explore how these epistemological shifts and the ensuing interdisciplinary approaches can help us revisit the concepts of ‘Area Studies’ and ‘regional traditions’, while at the same time, both Social Anthropology and Cultural studies inform the content of academic curricula: what do categories like ‘world’, ‘globality’, ‘region’, ‘locality’, ‘culture’, imagination, representation and creativity etc. mean and signify today?
Furthermore, we are exploring the new challenges and possibilities, geographies and genealogies of Area Studies engaged previously to current Western-centric geopolitics, which could generate critical and deconstructive approaches of anthropology and semiotics.
- What are the new methodological fields of knowledge and belonging?
- What kind of metaphors, representations and performances do they offer as analytical possibilities of understanding, complementary to the social analysis?
- How could an Area Studies perspective create new epistemological challenges, bringing together politics and dispositions of the elites and the powerless?
- In what ways do critical anthropological and semiotic approaches transcend or (re)frame, and produce cultural, material and other symbolic boundaries related to colonial technologies?
- Are there possibilities to establish comparative perspectives inside/outside the Area that could stress the significant experiences of the powerless, such as minorities, refugees, women?
- How do they create such decolonial ‘context’ giving voice and meaning to the ‘other correlated or co-creative stories’ than the national histories?
Keywords
social anthropology, area studies, borders, colonial geographies, decolonial
possibilities
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