Date: March 23-24, 2012
Site: Cambridge, United Kingdom
Organiser: The Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities (CRASSH), University of Cambridge

Topics: This conference asks what exactly is new about newly declared public goods such as transparency, accountability, devolution of power, efficiency, the offering-up of choice, the introduction of new technologies or the raising of measurable happiness? How do they manifest themselves through transformations in mundane administrative technologies? What sorts of affectivities are engendered by them? How do theoretical interventions on the penetration of neo-liberal political rationalities and technologies of governance intersect with observations on the gendered nature of bureaucracies or the structural violence that underpins them? What, indeed, are the unintended consequences of the profoundly political and moral alterations in the practice of rule that are being introduced in the name of new public goods? For instance, what is the impact of the utilisation of biometric ids by the Indian state in its disbursement of welfare provisions to the urban poor? Does this sophisticated technological fix render the state „transparent‟, does it allow for faultless identification of wholly individualised subjects? What forms of changes are wrought – pragmatically and affectively – by the replacement of „traditional‟ modes of bureaucratic identification of the poor (such as documents) with new high-tech identificatory techniques? The organizers invite papers from researchers detailing the alterations being effected in variegated bureaucratic formations via new and contested definitions of „the public good.‟ The conference is inter-disciplinary in its orientation. The organizers do not, thus, delimit submissions on the basis of disciplinary background. Ethnographic accounts of flexible bureaucracies are, however, particularly welcome.

Language: English
Deadline: October 21, 2011
Contact: Laura Bear; Nayanika Mathur
E-mail: l.bear@lse.ac.uk; nm289@cam.ac.uk
Internet: http://www.crassh.cam.ac.uk/events/1706/