PROPERTY
A graduate student workshop and a Keywords event.
Sponsored by the Center in Law, Society and Culture, the Institute for Money, Technology and Financial Inclusion (IMTFI), and the Departments of History and of Women’s Studies

Call for Papers
Papers due Monday, February 1, 2010

UC Irvine graduate students are invited to submit abstracts for an afternoon of interdisciplinary research discussion. Papers can address any aspect of property and its discontents, broadly construed.

Questions may include:
How did or do people and things become transformed into property? What opportunities and resistances were or are involved?
How can we understand practices of coercion, consent, and negotiation around having one’s means and products of subsistence made into commodities?
How can we understand how people were or are made into property?
What forms of discursive and practical negotiation did or do people deploy in collaboration with, or against, the processes of their social relations being remade in terms of property relations? How do these processes vary among historical periods and geographical regions?

Topics include all that can be owned, exchanged, invested, borrowed, credited, and circulated, including but not limited to people, souls, nature, culture, resources, labor, knowledge, software, fiction, bodies, machines, animals, and ideas.

*Submit a 500 word abstract by January 30, 2010*, as an email text (no attachments) with subject-line “Property” to kphilip@uci.edu. Selected participants will share full (4000-word) papers by Feb 27. Papers will be pre-circulated, and may be posted to a secure website. The workshop will take place over the afternoon of Wednesday, March 10, 2010. 3:00-5:00pm in Humanities Gateway #1030.

This graduate student development opportunity is made possible by support from the Center in Law, Society and Culture, the Institute for Money, Technology and Financial Inclusion (IMTFI), and the Departments of History and of Women’s Studies. It is organized by Professors Rachel O’Toole (History) and Kavita Philip (Women’s Studies).

Keywords is a series of quarterly events, now in its sixth year, organized by the Women’s Studies faculty. Keywords roundtable discussions have taken up contested terms with soverlapping, sometimes catachrestic, meanings that recur in various and divergent contexts. This is a special Keywords session that highlights graduate student research from across the UCI campus. Past keywords included international and local invited speakers, on topics including: regulation, area, offshore, private, immunity, pain, transparency, and author.