Workshop date: February 3, 2011
Location: University of Lapland, Rovaniemi, Finland
Funded by: the Finnish Academy
Keynote Speaker: Dr. Brad Evans, Lecturer and Program Director for International Relations, Leeds University, UK.
While there is growing research on ‘human security’ issues concerning indigenous peoples, in the Arctic and other regions, less attention has been given to issues of power and resistance. This workshop will engage with such perspectives, giving attention to how and why refusal of human security prescriptions takes place.
While an inevitable side-effect of refusal is self-deprivation, it may nevertheless lead to the creation of entirely new forms of solidarity and redefine the benefactor/recipient relationship in a more reciprocal and locally sensitive manner.
How might development and security be redefined such that it no longer meets statistical quotas set by technocrats in order to give a minimum valuation on the stock of indigenous life, but instead enriches the indigenous communities’ control over their own political affairs?
In thinking about what it means to ‘secure the indigenous’ this workshop will address some significant questions and problems. Not simply that of how to explain the ways in which neoliberal regimes of governance have achieved the subjections of indigenous peoples which they have. Neither that of how we might better equip them with the means to suborn their life more fully. But that of how indigenous life itself, in its subjection to governance, can and does resist, subvert, escape and defy the imposition of modes of governance which seek to remove it of those very capacities for resistance, subversion, flight, and defiance.
Papers addressing this topic are invited from anyone wishing to attend the workshop.
Send your abstracts (250-300 words) to:
Professor Julian Reid
E-mail: julian.reid@ulapland.fi
Deadline: by December 31, 2010.
CALL FOR PAPERS Securing the Indigenous: A Workshop
Fri, Dec 03, 2010
While development aid is nominally targeted at improving the ‘human security’ of indigenous peoples, in practice it functions to depoliticize them, shaping and conditioning the forms of subjectivity their life may take, such that they may be more amenable to liberal governance. Thus is it necessary for indigenous communities to practice negotiation and in some cases refusal of development policies targeted at them.