Theoria

CFP/Edited Collection

The Politics of Populations
David Karjanen and Courtney Helgoe, editors.

This edited collection pushes scholarship beyond identity politics and critiques of biopower to examine the practices, ideologies, and forces that forge the very populations which are objects of new and transforming technologies of governance, cultural politics, and practice in an era of increasing integration and conflict.

While neo-liberal global capitalism depends upon the accelerated movement of people and goods across borders and spaces, heightened concerns about such flows – those of national security, public health, and cultural identity – pose strong resistance to this fluidity. At the same time, states are changing, issues of security and risk are being transformed; new populations “made” and older populations “re-made.” These processes cut across all fields of intellectual theory and popular practice: politics, public health, demographics, statistics, immigration control, and so forth, all contribute to the changing way populations are conceived, made, and managed today. At the center of these processes are institutions, practices, and cultural politics that determine who and what will cross borders, who is appropriate to the nation, who can be a citizen, who merits being counted in government statistics, who is a threat to public health, national security, and/or racial and sexual purity. Such practices deploy both new and old technologies of risk, profiling assessments, and policies based on legislation, fusing cultural and ideological constructs based on race, nation, gender, sexuality, religion, class, and other forms of social differentiation. Though we might expect globalization to diminish the importance of national, ethnic, racial, and gendered identities, instead new techniques of identification are developing or being transformed- in particular, that new forms of “population” are emerging, and older historical “populations” are re-emerging.

This raises a number of questions this volume addresses:

• How do global economic and security conditions impact the methods and practices through which specific populations are defined and managed?
• How are different political or cultural domains brought together in the making of populations: such as public health and national security, race and the economics of labor migration?
• What are the historical and cultural precedents or antecedents to these methods?
• What are the institutions and practices that forge populations, and with what consequences?
• In short, how are certain groups “made” and reproduced, both through practices of representation and by more institutional means: bureaucracies, statistics, policies, and so on?

Thematic Topics include:

• Biopolitics, surveillance, and public health
• Sexuality, reproduction, and “risky” populations
• Demographics and census-taking
• Racialization and Racial profiling
• Refugees, “asylum seekers” and economic migration
• Technologies of territory: visas, guest workers, citizenship, border security
• Risk analysis and security assessment

Prospective chapters should be no more than 25-30 pages.

Please submit all proposals in abstract form to David Karjanen, Institute for Global Studies and Department of American Studies, University of Minnesota. Karjanen@umn.edu