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Call for Papers: Book
TERROR / WAR PAPERS: INTERROGATING THE PARADIGM

This book aims to interrogate a paradigm of contemporary reality summed up in the terms 'terror war' and 'war on terror'. Over the past few years, this paradigm has roped together the terms 'terror' and 'war' into a new globalised conglomerate of economy, bureaucracy, military, law, media, conflict, penality, and deceit. It has changed governments, generated new agencies and laws, captured media attention (whilst undermining its independence), incarcerated thousands, and killed tens of thousands (minimum) across the world. It delivers a reality so predominant, that it has been described as a potentially "endless war". Without denying the reality of victims of terrorism and war, this collection aims to open up a space for interrogating the paradigm. By intervening in the popularised relation of these terms - terror/war - this collection will question their dominance over alternative means of understanding contemporary realities and risks.

This book collection will address the practices, effects, and future of the paradigm. It will examine the definitions of terrorism; the discursive constructs unique to the terror war such as 'enemy combatants' and 'moral torture'; the invested technologies of the terror war; and the counter-publics (such as the anti-globalization movement and 'human shields') who posit an alternative set of priorities. In the course of examining the mobilisation of resources in the terror war, it will ask if there are other pressing realities - such as global warming, species degradation, over-population, and human rights violations - which are equally deserving of our terror, and our resources in combating them. What are the consequences of investing in terror war, over other priorities? How can 'terror' now be thought outside of terrorism?

Drawing on cultural theory, the essays in this book will introduce a range of political, legal, artistic and social critiques to a paradigm of 21st century reality: the terror war. We are seeking 350-500 word proposals for papers that theorize the following:
* Rhetorics of terror/war
* Affects of terror/war: biology, psychology
* Raced and gendered subjects of terror/war
* Technologies of terror/war: weaponry, counter-terrorism initiatives
* Economies of terror/war: privatisation of war, sponsored terrorism
* Media: articulating conflict, diplomacy, peace, settlement, endless war
* Border-protection, detention and occupation policies
* Freedoms and counter-terrorism policies
* Art and terror/war
* Film and television after 9/11
* Histories of terror, threat levels, fear
* Government without war
* Anti-globalization and the terror war
* Mourning 9/11
* Ecology after war: planetary futures

Please send your abstract on these and related issues via email to the editor, Dr Deborah Staines
Abstracts due: 20th December 2005

Dr Deborah Staines
Division of Society, Culture, Media and Philosophy
Macquarie University
Sydney, NSW, Australia 2109
E: dstaines_at_scmp.mq.edu.au

Dr. Deborah Staines
Researcher
Division of Society, Culture, Media and Philosophy
Macquarie University
North Ryde, NSW 2109
AUSTRALIA
E: deborah.staines_at_scmp.mq.edu.au
P: +61 2 9850 8980
W: http://www.ccs.mq.edu.au/staff_dstaines.html

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Received on Sat Oct 29 2005 - 14:48:31 EDT