Dear colleagues,
Please find attached and below the latest Call for Papers from the
Anthropological journal Etnofoor, on Utopia. STS contributions welcome!
Deadline for abstracts is March 18.
All best,
Else
On behalf of the Editorial Board of Etnofoor
Else Vogel
Assistant Professor in Anthropology
University of Amsterdam
Call for Papers: Utopia
Fredric Jameson (2005) famously wrote that it is easier to imagine the end
of the world than the end of capitalism. In the face of climate crisis,
geopolitical upheaval, and growing social inequality, the sense that the
world is indeed ending seems to grow each day, even amongst the most
privileged. In the face of increasingly dystopian futures, Utopian thinking
has made a striking comeback. Ambitious world-making projects can be found
in blockchain technology, AI-inspired imaginaries of technological
progression and automation, and large-scale reconfigurations of energy
systems towards renewable fuels. Anthropologists not only critically
analyse the promises of such techno-fixes (Prince and Neumark 2022), but
have, in their own ways, also invigorated a ‘post-progress’ utopian
politics; by looking for hope in the cracks of colonial, patriarchal and
racist systems, and by exploring world making amid capitalist ruins (Bear
et al. 2015; Bessire 2022; Tsing 2015). While some take ethnographic stock
of the prefigurative politics of social movements or highlight the
difficulty of brining progressive utopian ideals in practice (Hetherington
2020), others have suggested that anthropologists’ collaborative
orientation to a not-yet ‘otherwise’ may contribute to enduring struggles
against oppression and situated social and political healing (McTighe &
Raschig 2019). Such examples show that engaging with the materialization of
utopias, both as processes as well as concrete spatial arrangements (Harvey
2000), also offers a way to rethink the role of anthropology and
anthropological critique.
We invite papers to engage with Utopia as an analytic for the exploration
of world-making and world-breaking practices on different scales and in
various contexts. Contributions may explore the role Utopian thinking plays
in diverse cultural settings and communities, and detail how people work
towards realizing Utopian ideals – from religious notions of the Promised
Land to dreams of social justice– in practice. While Utopian imaginaries
emerge in emancipatory social movements, they also animate (neo)colonial
projects and fuel global and local conflict. Thinking with such diverse
examples raises critical questions: Who defines the horizon of Utopian
possibility? Who bears the costs of pursuing Utopian ideals? And what can
these troubles teach us about how Utopian thinking figures in social and
anthropological theory?
For this issue of Etnofoor we welcome papers addressing these or other
questions. We invite contributions that analyse Utopia through ethnographic
fieldwork or offer methodological, theoretical, or practical perspectives.
Please submit an abstract of no more than 200 words to editors@etnofoor.nl
before Monday 18 March 2024. We also welcome book or literature reviews
and creative contributions (such as photo essays or graphic narratives).
The deadline for authors of accepted abstracts to submit their full paper
is 1 June 2024.
[demime 1.01d removed an attachment of type application/pdf which had a name of Etnofoor SI Utopia Call for Papers 2024.pdf]
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