Call for papers for the Journal des anthropologues on the theme Margins and Digital Technologies

Social, political, cultural and economic challenges raised by digital technologies are often studied from the perspective of the educated urban populations who live in North America and Western Europe. Hence, these tools are attributed great powers. Their capacity to accelerate interactions and to reduce space-time distance is believed to impact deeply the ways we think and live. The kind of relations and simultaneous presence they foster have led us to reconsider communities, institutions and spaces using other models than those of discrete groups structured by territoriality. Moreover, it is generally considered that these technologies have reshaped the political economy of public speech in our societies, since they offer individuals or groups condemned to a form of social invisibility means to express themselves in the public space.

This call for papers asks for a shift of perspective by questioning the challenges raised by digital technologies from the “margins”. Contributors will be asked to focus on the ways they impact people’s lives outside of Western Europe and North America, as well as in spaces constructed as marginal. What shapes does the digital economy take within these spaces, through formal and informal channels? How do individuals appropriate the many existing technological devices generated by digital technologies? What are the new hierarchies and inequalities created by the (lack of) dissemination of these new tools?

Contributors will also focus on the ways minoritized groups are using digital tools for social, political, cultural or economic intervention. They should adopt a critical perspective by paying attention both to the limits and the ambiguities of the ways marginalized actors use these tools. While, digital tools have been used to promote emancipation, they can also lead to new forms of domination and enslavement.

Finally, this call for papers aims to promote a theoretical discussion about the notion of margins itself. How can we construct a robust notion of margins (be they spatial, political, cultural, or economic) in a world shaped by codes, algorithms, flux and networks, where the notions of distance, proximity, subject and object have to be re-examined?

Conducted by an interdisciplinary team, this call for papers is aimed at social scientists as well as digital practitioners (artists, programmers, hackers, etc…). This deliberately open call should allow for robust discussion with other research methodologies, social or artistic points of view. We will focus on three topics in this special issue:

Deconstructing and reconstructing margins

The papers should re-consider the ways by which margins are constructed. Contributors will question the relevance of this cultural and political construct, shaped by an Euclidian perception of space, that still dissociate between “centers” and “peripheries”. To what extent the study of different modes of appropriation of digital tools can highlight the situated and ethnocentered dimensions of this notion?

Margins and modes of appropriation of digital technologies

The papers should also focus on the specificities of modes of appropriation of digital tools in spaces constructed as marginal. How does digital technology pervades these spaces? Through which networks of formal/informal economy? How do dominant actors of digital technologies adapt to those modes of appropriation? In what ways marginal spaces are also places that favours offshoring strategies conceived by the dominant actors ? Digital technologies are often studied in urban contexts, how are they used in rural contexts? How do individuals, considered to be living at the margins, actually use digital tools? Can we consider margins as labs to understand the ways in which people subvert digital norms and dominant codes?

Margins and digital tools, between domination and resistance

Finally, the papers should discuss the ways marginalised actors (individuals, artistic and cultural groups, political groups…) use digital tools to defend their rights. How are those tools used by those actors (as means to transgress censorship, as means to gain visibility, as tools to mobilize…)? How do they organize, spread information, towards which audiences, on which scales and with what consequences? To what extent are those tools also constraining and how do those constraints impact people’s initiatives? What is the impact of these tactics compared to the strategies of social, political, economical and cultural domination, which also largely use digital tools?

Editorial team

Tristan Mattelart : Professor, International Communication Paris 8-Vincennes-Saint-Denis  Univeristy, Culture & Communication, member of the CEMTI

Cédric Parizot : Anthropologist of politics at the Institut d’Etudes et de Recherche sur le Monde Arabe et Musulman – IREMAM (CNRS, Aix Marseille Université) Aix en Provence.

Julie Peghini : Anthropologist, Associate professor, department Culture and Communication   Paris 8-Vincennes-Saint-Denis University,  member of the CEMTI

Nadine Wanono: Anthropologist and filmmaker, Researcher CNRS, Institut des Mondes   africains

Schedule

– 1^st of June 2014: Abstract should be send at: margesetnumerique@gmail.com 1000 and 1500 words
– 30 June 2014 : Answer to the authors
– Final version (40.000 typed characters, including spaces) should be received by November 2014
– This special issue will be published by the end of 2015

La conférence ICPP 2015 aura lieu à Milan du 1er au 4 juillet 2015. Frederica Infantino est co-chair du panel The bureaucrat and the law: policy implementation and interpretation in front-line public administration.

For this panel, we invite papers that focus on the process and context of policy implementation in front-line public services. We are specifically interested in papers that analyse how laws are interpreted and communicated among officials, and how this affects the original outcomes of policies. While the existence of an “implementation gap” is widely known, in-depth analyses of the black box of public administration are few and far between. We thus invite contributions from various policy fields in order to facilitate a wide discussion on practices at the “street-level” of bureaucracy. Through this, we seek to critically evaluate the relevance of frameworks like the one provided by Michael Lipsky 35 years ago. How does “law-in-action” deviate from the original text, and why? How are the objectives of law reconstituted in local settings? Do street-level bureaucrats achieve objectives that are tacit or unspecified? How is the application of discretion influenced by political conflicts and internal disputes about the meaning of law? How have the advent of new public management and recent austerity measures affected the autonomy of public servants? Is management or law the foundation of administrative action? Are the objectives of street-level bureaucrats law-driven or management-driven? In the panel, we seek to discuss these and related questions.

This panel proposes to analyse the ways in which officials working in “street-level” settings of public administration make sense of the legal basis of their work. It follows a “law-in-action” perspective that is interested in the way laws manifest themselves in their implementation, often causing effects that were unforeseen by policy makers (cf. Falk Moore 1978, Scott). Following Lipsky’s seminal work on “street-level bureaucracy” (1980), we seek to analyse the ways in which administrators use their discretionary powers. However, following more recent interpretative accounts of governance (see Rhodes 2009, Bevir and Rhodes 2010), accounts of policy implementation cannot stop at formal discretionary practices, but have to address how the meaning of law is interpreted and communicated among bureaucrats. This is particularly true for front-line services that are often far removed from those disseminating policies (Dubois 2010), and in which “occupational survival” strategies (Satyamurti 1982) can highlight “muddling through” over formal procedures. While knowing that an implementation gap is to be expected, there is still a dearth of in-depth analyses in this field. The studies that exist tend to address specific policy fields without addressing a wider audience. In order to fill this gap, we invite papers from different policy areas that focus on practices of legal implementation, highlighting mechanisms that help to explain differences in decisions and outcomes. We are particularly interested in exploring the practices of legal implementation in different policy domains. While the street-level policy implementation in welfare agencies has received much scholarly attention, other policy fields remains understudied. In the field of migration/border control policies, some researchers have addressed local implementation (Ellerman 2009, Eule 2014)) or encouraged research agendas that focus on the everyday practices of the plurality of power-brokers involved in the securing of borders (Kôté-Boucher, Infantino, and Salter 2014). However, researches of the street-level implementation in distinct policy areas rarely speak to each other. With this panel, we would like to bring more focus on mechanisms and processes of legal implementation across specific policy areas.

Chair

– Federica Infantino , université Libre de Bruxelles/Sciences Po Paris , federica.infantino@ulb.ac.be

– Tobias Eule, University of Bern, tobias.eule@oefre.unibe.ch

Plus d’informations et faire une proposition sur le site de la conférence

. Deadline : 15 janvier 2015

L’Institut Français Italie, la Chaire Unesco Population, Migrations et Développement de Sapienza Université de Rome et le Département des Méthodes et modèles pour l’Economie, le Territoire et la Finance Sapienza Université de Rome avec le soutien de l’Association Italienne d’Etudes de Population (AISP) organisent un colloque international sur « La Méditerranée: jeunesse, migrations et développement ». L’objectif du colloque est de montrer les nouvelles perspectives de recherche qui se dessinent sur la jeunesse, la migration et le développement dans la Méditerranée, en utilisant une approche interdisciplinaire.

Argumentaire

Le colloque vise à réunir les membres de la communauté scientifique, les acteurs du monde institutionnel et de la société civile qui s’intéressent aux jeunes, aux migrations et au développement en Méditerranée. En particulier, le colloque a pour but principal de fournir un large aperçu de la recherche actuelle sur trois populations définies:

1) les descendant-e-s de migrant-e-s (dites « les secondes générations ») ;
2) les enfants de réfugiés;
3) les mineurs non accompagnés.

Ces trois groupes sont en constante augmentation dans la plupart des pays européens. Les questions liées à l’intégration des plus jeunes dans la vie sociale, économique et politique des pays européens ont longtemps été au cœur des préoccupations de la communauté scientifique internationale. Récemment, les recherches menées sur ces populations, se sont également intéressées aux dynamiques transnationales, aux relations avec le «pays d’origine» et à leur rôle dans le développement du pays d’origine de leurs parents. Ce colloque, ouvert à la participation des acteurs associatifs et académiques, vise à recueillir des contributions pour approfondir le thème de l’intégration de ces trois catégories de jeunes, les politiques d’intégration qui leur sont consacrées, le transnationalisme et leur contribution éventuelle au développement du pays d’origine de leurs parents.

Axes thématiques

Nous invitons les chercheurs et doctorants à présenter des contributions à caractère théorique, méthodologique et/ou appliqué. Les contributions viendront de plusieurs disciplines ou seront pluridisciplinaires. Les principaux thèmes (sans exclusivité) couverts seront les suivants:

– l’intégration des descendant-e-s de migrant-e-s et des réfugié-e-s (par ex. mesures de –
l’intégration et politiques d’intégration),
– le transnationalisme et l’intégration (et le lien entre les deux);
– les descendant-e-s de migrant-e-s et des réfugié-e-s et le développement dans le pays d’origine (par ex. liens économiques, sociaux ou politiques avec le pays d’origine, les intentions de «retour»),
– les comportements démographiques des descendant-e-s de migrant-e-s et des réfugié-e-s
– les parcours des mineurs non accompagnés, leur intégration, les politiques destinées à cette catégorie de migrants, leur rapport avec les pays d’origine.

Modalités pratiques d’envoi des propositions

Les résumés des propositions, de 500 mots maximum, comprenant le nom, l’adresse mail, le titre et l’institution de rattachement des auteurs, devront être envoyées à youthmedconference2016@gmail.com avant le 15 octobre 2015
Langues de travail : anglais, français, italien.

Le colloque international aura lieu à l’université Sapienza à Rome du 4 au 6 mai 2016

Comité scientifique : Elena Ambrosetti, Chadia Arab, Ali Bensaad, Raimondo Cagiano de Azevedo, Fatima Goumri, Thomas Lacroix, Salvatore Strozza, Catherine Wihtol de Wenden

Comité organisateur : Elena Ambrosetti, Benedetta Cassani, Cristina Giudici, Federica Mazzarelli, Laura Norton, Angela Paparusso, Enza Roberta Petrillo, Benoît Tadié