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Fourth Critical Studies Conference on Development, Logistics, and Governance in Kolkata, 8-10 September 2011) Concept Note The Mahanirban Calcutta Research Group (CRG or the Calcutta Research Group) in collaboration with various other institutions has held in the in the last six years three critical studies conferences. The first conference held in 2005 was on “What is Autonomy?” The second conference held in 2007 was on “Spheres of Justice”. The third conference held in 2009 was on “Empires, States, and Migration”. The aim of these exchanges of ideas and scholarly works has been to promote critical thinking on issues affecting our lives. These exchanges have been inter-disciplinary, intense, and directed towards new thinking and ideas. The Fourth Critical Studies Conference will be on “Development, Logistics, and Governance”. It will be held on 8-10 September in Kolkata. The University of Western Sydney and the University of Bologna will collaborate with CRG in holding the conference. The conference will be preceded by a special workshop on “Transit Labour”, which will engage in a comparative study of labour in transit, emergence of new forms of labour, and labour involved in logistical activities. CRG along with collaborators has worked in the past on themes related to autonomy, rights, popular ideas of social justice, and transformations in the mode of governance in the post-colonial era. These themes and lines of inquiry have reached a stage where we need to discuss in a frame of historical sociology the main way/s in which our societies are being transformed by logistical operations in governance, the particular post-colonial nature of this logistical transformation, and the role that various forms of mobility and flows play in shaping logistical governance in post-colonial milieu. It seems to us that the notion of logistics will give this proposed conference on the dynamics of developmental governance the ballast to map out and navigate this landscape of flows, governmental responses, and the massive transportation and communication-centric network emerging in the process. Logistics is here conceived as a grid of responses to certain social challenges that the task of governing a society faces – challenges that can be briefly described as challenges of security, population movements, and territorial flux in the internal organisation of the State. Such a conference calls for an inter-disciplinary approach in a broad historical overview, which can account for the great changes in logistical management of the Indian and other societies. The Conference will probe questions like: What is logistics in the eyes of government? Logistics had its roots in the war model of organization, politics and the specific apparatus of that organisation. Thus in any construction of a war model, what are taken into account are considerations of logistics – therefore of movement of men and vehicles, communication, civil supplies, storage, terrain, facilities of entry and exit, construction of walls, canals, roads, trenches, depots, and bridges, or negotiating them, and finally watch and gaze, therefore of constructions of towers, and routes of policing and patrol – considerations uppermost in army planning. All these also imply particular way/s a territory for war making is to be was organised, such as choice of terrain, season, etc. All these as the histories of war reveal, are primarily a matter of logistics and logistical planning. Equally important will be the issue for discussion: How much of this war mode of governance has been incorporated in civilian mode of governance? In order to govern societies, how is “control of bodies” ensured? One can add to these queries the insights and the experiences of a post-colonial society such as India, where the imperative of development is acute, and the idea of “development” has caught hold of nationalist imagination to an almost unimaginable extent, adding new impetus to logistics and logistical planning of the society. War and development, or to be more precise, the war mode and developmental mode of politics have coalesced to give logistical planning a new urgency in governmental thinking and rationality. This is a new situation unanticipated in traditional theories of government. The real “logistical age” in the social narrative of India began in the last twenty years, based however on the long lineage of the railways and telegraph To name some of the eye catching developments in the recent years: massive construction of border roads, airports, opening up of the Indian sky to private airlines, new highways, gas pipelines, hi-tech cities, satellite monitoring, news technologies in climate forecast, improved capacity of disaster management, spurt in surface transport, increase in container traffic, new software for networking information and agencies, new and longer transmission lines, improved telecommunications including satellite phones and broadband services, increased capacity to deploy human power and material, enlarged storage capacity, new townships, and finally new defence equipments. These things - more than anything else, like as new industry, or improved agricultural productivity, or increase in small irrigation, or sustained entrepreneurship at local level, or massive increase in primary education and primary health services - are the marks of development. They are also the staple agenda of governance. In such cases, logistical awareness is more like an inbuilt feature of governance, guiding governmental rationality. In all these again, one has to note the gradual emergence of a redesigning of the territory, and thus a re-division of labour. For instance, there are logistical divides marking the territory. Again, different kinds of flows mark the territory differentially. The conference proposes to be an occasion for exchanges on studies on logistical governance. We invite panels / papers on related themes such as: · The logistics of population mobilisation, control, management, and the phenomenon of transit labour · Developmental logistics · Logistics of elections · The development of border roads · Disaster Management · Impact of military administration on civilian governance · Control regimes of mobile diseases · The economy of logistics The last date for sending proposals and abstracts is 31 March 2011, and the last date for receiving papers will be 31 July 2011. Please send proposals or abstracts to suhit@mcrg.ac.in CRG will have no fund for travel assistance to participants. However it will provide accommodation for 3 nights. The registration fee for the conference will be Rs. 500 (Five hundred rupees) only. Annexure 1 – Programme Schedule and Details
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Third Critical Studies Conference on Empires, States, and Migration in Kolkata, 11-12 September 2009) 1. The Theme In much of the era of twentieth century industrialism and capitalism the phenomenon of migration seemed as an exception to human societies and development. Societies and states, particularly after the Second World War, seemed to have taken on the shape of stable nation states with their defined citizenries, territories, laws, economies, and geographies. While multinational corporations (MNCs) worked in a frame of global operations, yet the structure of these operations were mostly territorially bound, and encouraging trans-national migration was not a complaint lodged against them by powers of global governance. Even if peasants were migrating, or various migrant populations were very much present on earth shaping all through the century as earlier the pattern of human settlements, yet history appeared as one of the sacred territories of the national societies. Partitions appeared as exceptions, and the reproduction of the method of partition as a way of stabilising societies and forming states notwithstanding provoking population flows and creating unclean futures was ignored. As if the sacred history of settled societies had little to do with these messy presents and pasts. Of course migration is not something new; it is as old as human history. Indeed, a whole science had meanwhile grown up around the phenomenon of migration – geography and economics being the two most pursued disciplines of knowledge in the task of understanding migration. Settlements, wages, remittances, and several other issues have crowded the field of migration studies. Ethnography, in general anthropology and later on cultural studies have also made their distinctive marks. Of more contemporary interest however is the phenomenon of forced migration. The attention on forced migration in recent time is due to the surge in human rights movements, and thus the awareness of the need to protect the victims of forced migration. This has resulted in theories, laws, policies, and practices relating to vulnerability, care, protection, boundary making exercises, citizenship, and most importantly displacement. A great number of institutions of human rights and humanitarian work now mark the field. National, regional, and international regimes of protection have emerged. Yet this begs the question, how far can we differentiate between voluntary migration and forced migration particularly in the light of recent massive and mixed population flows? Labour has remained through all these debates and discussions the silent other name of the figure of the migrant. When mostly this migrant labour appears as illegal, what sense shall we make of the issue of trafficked labour, who should have died with the emergence of free contract-bound labour appearing often in the juridical figure of the citizen? This complicates the scenario even more, and makes the world of settled production even more contingent on several factors including labour flows. In today’s world of globalisation, many may ask, are we really far away from the nineteenth century world of indentured labour that marked entire world of production? Also, with migrant labour marking the capitalist production system what will happen to settled forms of democracy, according to some, bourgeois democracy? Should we not study older histories of empires, which were characterised by mobility in more pronounced ways? Empires bring the issues of globalisation of various kinds and centuries. Migrations connote borders, mobilities, and their governing. Empires govern migrations, states govern migrations. Is there any common ground between the two ways of governing? And once again significantly, do all these mean that we take border as a method of study? The Third Critical Studies Conference proposes to discuss all these questions we have sought to assemble under the title, Empires, States, and Migration. Scientific disciplines will help us to understand some of the questions raised, inter-disciplinary approaches will help even more. Critical ways of interrogating and analysing will enable us to go further and allow us to raise new questions while making sense of the earlier ones. About five years ago the Calcutta Research Group (CRG) started hosting meetings to link with various strands of critical thinking on issues of our time and having great stakes in our lives. The First Critical Studies Conference (29 –30 July 2005) deliberated on What is Autonomy? The Second Critical Studies Conference (20-22 September 2007) focused on Spheres of Justice. Research papers, discussion notes, commentaries, and volumes came out of these meets. More important, scholars and thinkers from various countries including large numbers from within India cutting across the post-colonial divides attended the two deliberations, and were able to forge links and exchanged ideas. The Second Conference had an additional programme. It was a one day workshop with Etienne Balibar – a day long exchange of ideas between a select group of conference participants and Kolkata scholars and the philosopher. For reports of these two conferences, and the workshop interested people may visit the CRG website. 2. Necessary details of the Third Conference The Third Critical Studies Conference will be held in Kolkata on 11-12 September 2009. CRG invites individual proposals for papers and desirably panels. Each panel will consist of three papers and a moderator. There will be special lectures as part of the conference. The Conference will not be able to offer any travel assistance; there will be modest accommodation arrangements for three nights for outstation participants. Registration fee for Indian participants will be Rs. 300/ (Three hundred only) and for participants outside India the fee will be USD 100 (USD one hundred only). Below is an indicative list of sub-themes and issues to be covered at the Conference. CRG welcomes other suggestions as well. The last date for submitting proposals for panels and papers will be 15 April 2009, submitting abstracts 15 May 2009, and for full papers 10 August 2009. Inquiries about themes and panels are welcome. All inquiries may be addressed (with copies) to: -
Sanam Roohi:sanam.roohi@gmail.com 3. Some of the probable themes and Issues a) Imperial formations and Migration (migrations in and under empires, modern empires and new slavery, plantation economies, neo-imperial formations and flows of labour, Diasporas, etc.) b) States, Nations, Migration, and Citizenship (violence, displacement, and citizenship, the right to return, sacred space of the nation, citizenship laws, autonomous flows of migration, globalisation and forced migration, trafficking, possibilities of a differently structured world factoring in mobility, etc.) c) Economies and the government of Population Flows (discussion on governmental technologies to make migration a part of the market, migration markets, migration in a police planet) d) Beyond Economics and Anthropology? Narratives of Forced Migration (gendered narratives, the multi-layered messages, partition narratives, camp lives and experiences, narrative as a method to understand forced migration and its trauma, etc.) e) The World of Humanitarianism - Institutions of Care and Protection (institutional studies, critiques of humanitarian ideologies, case studies) f) Gender and Forced Migration. Migrant as the abnormal (settled formations as the normal and the figure of the migrant as the abnormal – historical overviews)
Annexure 1 –
Programme Schedule and Details |
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First
Conference on Critical Thinking
What is Autonomy?
Venue:
Academy of Fine Arts, Kolkata Conference Statement In the first decade of the twentieth century where we live in, autonomy has become one of the major concerns of our social and political existence. Right to autonomous life is now a political, cultural, and social call of both individual and the groups - a rare conformity that points to the critical importance of the problematic of autonomy in the agenda of critical thinking. As is currently understood, the notion of autonomy, both as something that belongs to human beings and human nature, and as something that is the source or basis of morality, that is, duty, is bound up inextricably with the philosophy of our time. The term began to be applied primarily or even exclusively in a political context, to “civic communities” possessing independent legislative and self-governing authority. Then the term was taken up again in the context of individual rational persons that is in the context of their individual rights and existences, for their individual modes of behavior. In the background of the upsurge of anti-colonial movements the term gained new perspectives and meanings, which would now imply not only new rights, but also new responsibilities (autonomy of whom, for whom, in respect to what?). It became the emblem of group rights, in particular minority rights. In time the idea of autonomy became not only the standard of rights or responsibilities, but also an issue of govern mentality - something that denotes transaction, government, negotiation, and relating to others on the basis of set rules. So we have now the questions: If autonomy has been emblematic of rights, does it take into account the gendered nature of the term? Can we trace the birth of the autonomous subject? What are the relevant constitutional and juridical thoughts shaping the universe of autonomy? Why is autonomy, an idea that holds universal attraction for mass politics, related to so much violence? Is autonomy one more regulated term, or is the concept autonomous, so that we can speak of autonomy of the autonomies? And, is private property, to go the fundamentals, a problematic for autonomy? What is autonomy without access to resources? On the other hand, if forms of ownership of resources determine autonomy, what is left of autonomy as a norm? If we relate the concept of autonomy to the more familiar notions of freedom or self-determination, we can locate in this case the questions of responsibility and the conditions of freedom. Autonomy generally is held as a valued condition for persons in liberal cultures. We uphold autonomous agents as the exemplar of persons who, by their judgment and action, authenticate the social and political principles and policies that advance their interests. But the sceptic may ask if we are not being “blinded” by the ideal of autonomy, and therefore the question, what happens if we value autonomy too much? In autonomous action the agent herself directs and governs the action. But what does it mean for the agent herself to direct and to govern? In the context of the emerging demands for group autonomy, the further question to be probed is if this is not now the occasion to investigate and re-envision the concept of democracy with the norm, principles, and various forms of autonomy and more importantly in a way, where the standards of minimal justice become the foundation for a new democratic outlook inscribed by practices of autonomy perched on understanding of each other. Accommodation becomes the form of responsibility for the agency that wills autonomy. In the history of thought reason has co-opted our conception of autonomy. Given this history, it can be argued that the task is now to set autonomy free. But the question is how? Surely, the problem is in the way the self defines the claims for autonomy, the way in which it relegates the issue of justice and understanding from considerations of autonomy. Law becomes in such conditions the most assured site of autonomy, and the juridical arrangement handed down from the top becomes the only possible form of autonomy. The paradox is then: if we are governed by reason in what we choose and how we choose, that means that we subject ourselves to reason in this business of what and how we choose; we are not in that case autonomous. Yet, if we say that we are not governed by reason but by desires and passions, then in that case we are not governing ourselves in what we choose, and we are not therefore autonomous. The way out of the closure has to be sought in historical understanding of the way in which the two principles of autonomy and accommodation have worked in political life, and the way in which standards of justice have negotiated the relation between autonomy and accommodation. We require both historical and analytical understanding of the issue for such a critical enterprise. We require moreover deeper and rigorous understanding of the geo-political and ethno-political grounds on which the call for autonomy is now articulated and which modulate the self’s understanding of the norm. Similarly the need is to inquire into the ethical grounds on which the call for autonomy is given and practices of autonomy continue. The purpose of the conference is to inquire into conditions and dimensions of autonomy, their historical nature, and their political significance in terms of enriching democracy. The conference will be held in Kolkata, India, on 29-30 July 2005. Structured around panel discussions, the conference will deal with six themes, which will form the panel sub-themes:
The Birth of the Autonomous Subject (Panel
Convener: Samir K. Das –
samir@mcrg.ac.in) Various experiences on movements for autonomy will be discussed in the context of the sub-themes. The conference is part of a research and dialogue programme on autonomy, which CRG has been conducting with the support of the Ford Foundation. Interested paper contributors may contact the panel conveners. Inquiries are welcome and all other inquiries can be addressed at mcrg@mcrg.ac.in Registration charge for the conference is Rs. 100/ per person. Copies of the papers will be available on payment of photocopying charge and on the CRG website. Panels will be finalised by 30 April 2005, and papers will have to be submitted by 30 June 2005. The conference will not have general travel support fund. But it will provide full accommodation for the participants during their stay for the conference. In case of partial or exceptional travel support inquiries can be addressed to panel conveners or at mcrg@mcrg.ac.in The Conference on “What is Autonomy?” will be the first in a series of annual conferences that CRG will hold on critical thinking in India. Organising Committee: Members: Samir Kumar Das, Paula Banerjee, Sanjay Barbora, Sanjay Chaturvedi, Arun Kumar Patnaik, and Sabyasachi Basu Ray Chaudhury,
Convener: Ranabir Samaddar
Director
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