| Popis |
The proposed workshop focused on re/production of the concepts of East and peripheries in the everyday practices of human, institutional and technological actors. Although some inspiration for this first workshop draws from actor network theory (Latour, Law, Mol, etc) and broadly phenomenological approaches, the aim is to open out the debate on what might constitute East and periphery, and to focus on everyday practices involved in generating a sense of East and periphery. Many social analyses of the concept East draw upon the perspective of postcolonial, structuralist and/or Foucauldian studies. The object of attention in these approaches has been either the historical process of representation of Others (inspired by, for e.g., Edward Said) or reflection of these representations by those represented, i.e. the Others (inspired by, inter alia, Maria Todorova). These approaches suggest that concepts, symbol, discourse or representation precedes practice: conceptions of the West about the Orient first create conditions which later enable action in a particular (orientalist) way. Images, ideas, narrations, metaphors, mental maps... these and other representations precede practices in these approaches, both at the centre and at the periphery. While those approaches have many merits, particularly in pinpointing some of the discursive means through which a sense of both East and marginality have developed over time in different contexts, this workshop will focus more on practices. It aims to investigate and discuss different everyday enactments of the East and peripheries as the outcome of various actions and habitual practices. Through studying practice we want to display how different actors re/make reality. If the East, peripheries and centres are not conceived as a priori existing frames in which practice take place, but rather as entities which are themselves enacted by concrete practice, then we cannot presuppose the existence of the East, peripheries, and centre as consistent, homogeneous and singular phenomena. The workshop hopes to explore these entities as multiple in Mol s sense in The Body Multiple: Ontology in Medical Practice (2002). It is then no longer possible to keep the notion of one East created and one centre with one eastern periphery. The workshop will explore the concept of multiplicity in relation to both East and periphery. However and whenever multiple Easts and peripheries are enacted, they also arise as a result of interactions between various actors. As has been particularly noted in actor network theory, the ability to act is not restricted to people or institutions (who are usually at the centre of social theory) but also involves other non-humans: international border crossings, legal norms and directions, documents or technologies participating at control of mobility. The workshop welcomes any research material that will enlarge the scope of our knowledge in the social sciences or humanities; we also welcome proposals that combine the theme of this Workshop with any of the Work Group topics. Such papers should be advanced interpretations of both theory and empirical data (where papers contain empirical data).
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