We have extended the deadline for submissions to the panel on critique,
resistance and collaboration. The new deadline is Sept. 2, 2006.
-------------------------

We are proposing a panel at the Latin American Studies Association 2007 International Conference (Montreal, Sept 2007). The Congress theme is "After the Washington Consensus: Collaborative Scholarship for a new America." The panel is titled:

CRITIQUING COLLABORATION—COLLABORATING CRITIQUE/
RESISTING COLLABORATION—COLLABORATING RESISTANCE

Collaboration is a term that has been increasingly popular in a range of
fields, from the arts and cultural studies to political science and various
inter- and intra-cultural research methodologies. Today, collaboration is
frequently touted as the antidote of choice to counter the problems of
power relations that inhere in group process. On one hand, collaboration
can be an effective tool for political, cultural, and social resistance,
but on the other hand it has often been, like the language of
multi-culturalism, appropriated by various state apparatuses and, perhaps
due to the conventions of political correctness, the term, its uses, and
its politics, have not received sufficient critical inquiry. Even in the
LASA call for the conference, the notion of an hierarchical unilateral
"consensus" is countered against the notion of "collaboration." There is an
assumption that collaboration, when labeled as such, is always resistant,
anti-hierarchical, or anti-imperialist. For example, the call asks, "What
happens when our approaches to the study of history, society, politics and
culture in Latin America explicitly incorporate the horizontal,
collaborative, and egalitarian principles that might be contra-posed to the
perspective of the Washington Consensus?" This rhetoric hastens to connect
the notion of collaboration with horizontal social structures rather than
hierarchies and with egalitarian principles rather than other forms of
organization. Our panel on critique, resistance, and collaboration aims to investigate the complexities of a range of collaboration—from collaboration as anti-imperialist critique to critiques of collaboration and the frequent
over-valorization of it as a social form or mode of production. For
example, when does collaboration become or fold into corruption? What are
the political aims of the valorization of collaboration in particular
social, cultural, or historical contexts? How does the horizontal model of
collaboration dismiss many forms of collaboration,which in fact do rely on the use of hierarchical organizational skills or naively disregard power relations at play in collaboration? And what happens when empire itself begins to use the practices or models of "collaboration?" How must our research, theory, and terminology shift to account for such complexities? Why do we make value assumptions about certain kinds of collaborations? How are we making these assumptions? How can we use forms of critical collaboration and become more aware of embedded ideologies and power dynamics? Do we need to be more suspicious of uncritical forms of collaboration that replicate existing power relations in unfortunate ways? We also aim to include papers that reflect on the critical and/or resistant
possibilities of certain collaborations, particularly those that cross
national borders.

Co-organized, or co-labored, by Dr. Julia Medina (jmedina_at_albion.edu) and
Dr. Shannon Rose Riley (sriley_at_saintmarys.edu).

Submit 300 word abstracts, current CV, etc. by email to both organizers no
later than September 02, 2006.

CONFERENCE INFO:
LASA 2007 International Congress
Dates: September 6-8, 2007
Location: Montreal, Canada
Call for Proposals Deadline: September 8, 2006
Website: http://lasa.international.pitt.edu/congress/about.html

----------------------------------------------
Shannon Rose Riley, MFA, PhD
CWIL Postdoctoral Fellow
Department of Communication and Performance Studies
Department of Intercultural Studies
101 Moreau
St. Mary's College
Notre Dame IN 46556

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Received on Wed Aug 23 2006 - 17:09:25 EDT