CALL FOR PAPERS

Solidarity: "The Social" in Thought and Practice

Graduate Student History Conference

New York University

April 2-3, 1999

Graduate students in the History Department at New York University announce a conference on the theme of "solidarity" and invite graduate students in all fields and periods of history to submit abstracts for papers. We use "solidarity" to refer to social phenomena that have come to be called mass action, political mobilization, and coalition-building. Calling attention to "solidarity" addresses recent trends in the academy. Many intellectual and cultural historians argue that discourse, ideology, and narrativity ought to be privileged categories of social analysis. To what extent has this view challenged or supplanted an older view that society is to be studied as a realm of competing structures, contending classes and groups, and conflicts over material resources? We invite students to present historical work that showcases the various interpretive and methodological tools that historians bring to the study of "solidarity."

We encourage prospective panelists to submit abstracts of papers that address any of the four following questions:

• FIRST, is the study of society an exercise in metaphysics, disguised as science, or is it a professionally anchored way of investigating and knowing the social world?
• SECOND, if discourse constitutes the social, to what degree have competing discourses operated as agents of historical change and how have they been socially located?
• THIRD, can a focus on mass action, political mobilization, and coalition-building be reconciled with the view that power exists difusely and cannot be located in particular groups, classes, or institutions?
• FOURTH, how have recent explorations into the social construction of identity promoted or undermined "solidarity" as a matter of practical politics?

While we are not soliciting panel proposals, we suggest that panel topics could include:

• Identity, Politics, and Social Change
• Individuality and Solidarity
• Resistance as Solidarity
• Has the Idea of the "Public Sphere" Fallen Flat?
• Academic Knowledge and Its Social Uses?
• The Problems of Collective Action
• Solidarity and the Discursive Construction of the Social
• The Reflexivity of Social Knowledge

Please submit proposals by OCTOBER 15, 1998. Proposals should include a one-page abstract and a curriculum vitae, and should be sent to the following address:

Quelle = Email <H-Soz-u-Kult>

From: H-Net Announcements Editor <announce@h-net.msu.edu>
Subject: CFP: Solidarity: "The Social" in Thought & Practice, Graduate Student History Conference, NYU, April 2-3, 1999
Date: 30.4.1998

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