INTERNATIONAL INTERDISCIPLINARY CONFERENCE
Commission on Urban Anthropology (CUA), International Urban Symposium (IUS) and Centre for Social Anthropology and Computing (CSAC)

Purposeful Agency and Governance: A Bridgeable Gap

Venue & Date: University of Kent, Canterbury, U.K. 15 to 17 June 2016

Convenors: Giuliana B. Prato, Italo Pardo and Michael Fischer

With reference to urban settings and the interactions between cities and regions, this Conference aims to contribute to increasing our capacity to understand important processes of agency in a worldwide context marked by a growing gap between citizenship and governance.

This Conference will address the interplay between personal morality and civic responsibility, and between value and action. Ethnographers have demonstrated the moral and cultural complexity of individual action and the ways in which misplaced or instrumentally selective moralities in policy and in the production and enforcement of the law encourage exclusion and widen the gap between governance and the governed across the world. They have demonstrated the impact of rules and regulations that are ambiguous, elusive, biased towards those in power, badly defined or impossible to apply, thus compounding the perceived weak legitimacy of governance and the law in the broader society.

The Conference welcomes ethnographically-based contributions that identify the gaps and obstacles related to the development of purposeful agency and the normative changes needed to encourage, rather than frustrate, agency and good governance, intended as governance that promotes and makes the best of the local resources and styles of citizenship.

Abstracts of proposed Papers should be submitted by 1 March 2016. Panel Proposals should be submitted by 26 February 2016. Submit abstracts of Papers or Panels to the Convenors: i.pardo@kent.ac.uk: g.b.prato@kent.ac.uk; m.d.fischer@kent.ac.uk

Selected papers will be considered for publication in a Special Volume of the Series Palgrave Studies in Urban Anthropology and in the peer-reviewed journal Urbanities.

For more information visit the Conference website.