Call for papers for a workshop I’m speaking at in September, along with a number of very interesting other speakers.
Call for Proposals: Workshop Regimes of Calculation and Global Governance
September 19-20, 2013
Balsillie School of International Affairs, Waterloo, Ontario, Canada
Please submit 300 word abstracts to calculation.workshop@gmail.com by Monday, June 15, 2013.
Practices of calculation underpin modes of governance and enable new forms of measurement and prediction at various scales and sites. Our life expectancy and retirement funds are calculated, along with global greenhouse gases and national debts. Calculation techniques can be profoundly inventive and transformative, conjuring up previously unseen terrains of contestation while simultaneously obscuring others. Calculation thus needs to be considered political from the outset. In sum, calculation has become a common and taken-for-granted practice that shapes how we act in the world. Without calculation, too, scholars of global governance are faced with large empirical gaps and theoretical dead ends.
This workshop seeks to bring together scholars whose objects and purposes of investigation may differ, but who share an important point of contact: a focus on calculability as a technique that may come to exert forms of control over people, places and things. The workshop asks: What is the role of calculation in global governance? To what extent have recent and on-going ecological and financial crises opened, constrained or otherwise transformed calculative projects? Using these questions as a starting point, our workshop addresses ‘Regimes of calculation’ which are practices and techniques that are used, for example, to represent social patterns through statistical or quantitative measurement.
We encourage PhD students and junior scholars from fields including, but not limited to, political science, sociology, geography, history and economics to submit proposals. Travel fund support may be available. Proposals that address the following themes are encouraged:
1) Calculative Vulnerabilities: Environment, Climate Change and Security,
2) Calculative (Im)mobilitites: Economies, Borders, and Regulation,
3) Sustaining Calculabilities: Food and Agriculture, Bodies, Health and Population,
4) Anti-Metrology: Sites of Resistance and Immunity from Calculation.
The event will consist of an opening keynote to situate regimes of calculation and global governance by Dr. Stuart Elden, and confirmed participants include Dr. Suzan Ilcan, University of Waterloo, Dr. Michelle Murphy, University of Toronto, Dr. Wendy Larner, University of Bristol, Dr. Mark Salter, University of Ottawa, and Dr. William Walters, Carleton University.
Carbon Democracy 
