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Publication Call for Papers Announcement
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PoLAR: Political and Legal Anthropology Review
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| Sponsor: Association for Political and Legal Anthropology |
| Contact Information Elizabeth Mertz Email: polar@law.wisc.edu |
| Description CALL FOR PAPERS The Association for Political and Legal Anthropology and PoLAR announce an upcoming Symposium Issue on Nongovernmental Organizations (NGOs): GETTING IT DONE: ETHNOGRAPHY OF AND IN NGOS NGOs have been lauded as prime movers behind positive social change. Increasingly, however, anthropologists and others have critiqued NGOs for acting as handmaidens to liberalism or as an arm of the state. On the one hand, they promise the possibility of linking local marginalized populations with local, regional, national, and international structures of power. On the other hand, NGOs may harm the populations they purport to serve -- due to their uneasy relationships with the state, regulatory agencies, and social networks that provide legitimacy, as well as to the dilemmas posed by their own ongoing sustainability. This Symposium Issue examines the multiple intended and unintended functions of NGOs. NGOs are increasing in both presence and dominance, and they play key roles in both promoting and subverting discourses of power. Anthropologists are not only involved in ethnographic research on NGOs, but they also work for NGOs. Thus anthropologists are positioned both to understand the contested space within which NGOs work, and also to serve as advocates who promote the goals of NGOs. This Symposium welcomes papers that address the ambiguous roles of NGOs - and anthropologists -- as they negotiate these multifaceted positions. We hope to examine the roles of the state, global entities, activists, and the people whom NGOs purportedly serve. We also seek to bring together a range of perspectives regarding methodology, ethnography, and ethics in the study and practice of NGOs - perspectives that themselves may emanate from both theory and practice. PLEASE SUBMIT YOUR ARTICLES AND ESSAYS TO US AT: polar@law.wisc.edu. ARTICLES RECEIVED BY DECEMBER 20, 2009 will be considered for this Symposium Issue. |
| Keywords: NGOs | governmentality | neoliberalism |
| This announcement will be displayed until: 01/01/2010 |