This Conference aims at understanding the roles and
meanings of informal practices in the context of the current political and
economic crisis in Western society. Using a notion of informality that
encompasses the economic, the social and the political realms, this conference
seeks to explore the importance of informal practices in cities and asks the
key question Is the informal a panacea in times of crisis?
In today’s global
scenario, urban settings are a dominant form of associated life that
encapsulate the socio-economic impact of increasingly significant international
regulations, and selective management of capital, knowledge and people. Over
the last three decades, the crisis, and subsequent discredit, of polarized
ideologies which had characterized international politics since the Second
World War has apparently determined the supremacy of economics over politics,
an acceleration of economic globalization and a progressive erosion of
democracy. In many cases, however, politics in the form of authoritarian
decision-making and superimposed adverse policies have jeopardised the
democratic covenant and the attendant terrains of representation,
responsibility and accountability in the exercise of the power to rule. This
process has often brought about the loss of important parts of sovereignty, as
wealthier nations and powerful supranational interest groups have been seen to
bully weaker nations, often also resulting in ever-growing fiscal demands and
withdrawal of credit throughout the social scale, which has often been
paralleled by national and local governance riding roughshod over the broader
society. At the micro-level, this combination of events has engendered harsh
living conditions for many ordinary people. Major casualties have been
individuals’ access to basic rights and governments’ responsibility and
accountability in the management of power. Mass migration from poorer countries
to richer or relatively richer countries, or to countries that are perceived to be richer,
has contributed to make this problem worse, often turning traditional cultures
of tolerance into toleration and, sometimes, violent rejection of
non-autochthonous people.
Anthropologists
have addressed in-depth the significance of the informal in people’s managing
existence. In the economic field they have addressed informal practices that
develop beyond official employment and unemployment. In the social and
political fields they have studied in depth cronyism, clientelism, obscure
awards of public contracts and various forms of collusion that turn citizens’
rights into privileges; on the other hand, they have addressed informal
exchanges of services, help, information, knowledge, and so on, that take place
at the grassroots in response to ever-shrinking — sometimes factually
inexistent — social
welfare systems. Gradations of these grassroots informal
activities draw on access to community resources beyond official allocation; in
the economic field, they defy attempts of the state to monitor, regulate and
extract revenue from the production, circulation and consumption of goods.
Empirical analysis has also suggested that in most cases we are not faced with
a duality between formality and informality because in many cases the two are
intimately interlocked in people’s lives. In the economic field it has been
found that the informal and the formal are complex interlinking and interacting
sectors of one economy that may be lethally affected by the aforementioned
difficulty, or in some cases by the impossibility to access capital.
In the above
outlined scenario, informal activities and modes of exchange — economic and
non-economic — have often grown and they may have contributed to people
survival; in other cases, long-established informal economic activities have
disappeared alongside informal exchanges, while secure formal employment has
become a chimera for many and zero-hour contracts, unpaid “internships” and
similar, variously named cons, have multiplied. At the same time, new forms of
informality are emerging — particularly but not only in the “on-line world” —
that appear to be acquiring the status of resource as they raise new challenges
to the bullies and “roughshod riders”.
This Conference
will bring together high-quality ethnographic studies of these processes with
the three-pronged aim of clarifying grassroots dynamics, contributing to a
comparative analysis of the present situation and developing a theoretically
viable discussion of potential way-outs.
The Conference
welcomes contributions and panels from anthropologists and scholars from other
disciplines and encourages participation of research students.
Abstracts (300 words maximum) should be emailed by
the 27th of February 2017 to Dr Giuliana B. Prato (g.b.prato@kent.ac.uk), Dr Italo Pardo (I.Pardo@kent.ac.uk) and Dr Manos Spyridakis (maspy@uop.gr). Selected papers and panels
will be announced by the 13th March 2017.
A selection of revised papers that speak to each
other will be brought together for publication in a Special Issue of Urbanities. Revised papers
not included in this Special Issue will be considered individually for
publication in Urbanities.
The Organizing Committee will
make all possible efforts to cover accommodation costs (hotel and meals) for
the participants.
Registration
Fee
Registration fee, to be paid by
20th March 2017: 60 Euros. Postgraduate students, on-site
registration fee: 15 Euros.
Dr Giuliana Prato, G.B.Prato@kent.ac.uk Dr Italo Pardo, I.Pardo@kent.ac.uk Dr Manos
Spyridakis,
maspy@uop.gr Dr Maria Velioti, mvel2009@hotmail.com
Dr Giuliana Prato (University of Kent)
Dr Italo Pardo (University of Kent)
Dr Manos Spyridakis (University of Peloponnese)
Dr Maria Velioti,
(University of the Peloponnese)
On behalf of the Scientific Committee, Dr Italo Pardo
President, International Urban Symposium - IUS
Co-Editor, Urbanities
Co-Editor, 'Palgrave Studies in Urban Anthropology'.
Co-Editor, Series 'Urban Anthropology'
https://www.routledge.com/series/ASHSER1320
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