34th Annual Meeting of the Social Science History Association
Long Beach, California
12-15 November 2009
Submission deadline: 1 March 2009
The 2009 Program Committee seeks panel proposals that will focus on questions related to Agency and Action. Agency – the capacity to act – is a concept central to everyday life and many academic disciplines. But quite different ideas of actors and agency abound. Constructivists celebrate agents as the autonomous springs of action. Utilitarians focus on agents as both foundational units of social structure and evasive delegates in need of monitoring. What are we to make of the relationship between these camps, each in its own way faithful to the idea of the unified social actor operating within external constraints, and others’ ideas of subjects as internally riven and constituted by social, biological or discursive structures?
Turn the problem around, then, and foreground historical formations of agency, including social movements and the ‘depersonalized edifices’ of firms, states, families, networks, associations, schools, churches, and other forms of organized social order in whose name people act. How these edifices emerge, are designed, built, demolished and rebuilt, in continual processes of change: this is the flip side of the agency question.
As social science historians and historical social scientists, we hail from many traditions and disciplines. But we share common ground in the weight we assign to thinking historically about agency and action. In exploring the connections between agency and history, can we deploy our differences to advantage? How might our collective intellectual resources help each of us rethink our own and others’ work? More broadly still, what do the streams of social science history imply for understanding action in today’s world, and for the historical social science of the future? Let’s embark.
How to participate in the 2009 SSHA Program
Proposals for individual papers and complete sessions will be accepted at http://ssha.org. Proposals for individual papers and complete sessions are due 1 March 2009. Papers and Panels on themes not related to the “Agency and Action” theme are also welcome. SSHA will continue its generous support of graduate student travel, with the exciting addition of the Charles and Louise Tilly Fund, which will provide travel grants and, funds permitting, graduate student support for interdisciplinary research.
If you are interested in building a session (always our preference) or making an individual submission (always okay), please contact:
- Marynel Ryan Van Zee (mkryan#umn.edu)
- Pavla Miller (pavla.miller#rmit.edu.au)
Submissions on the theme are encouraged but responding to the theme is not necessary.
from: H-WOMEN@H-NET.MSU.EDU
Subject: CFP: SSHA session on passivity and/as agency
From: „Marynel Ryan Van Zee“
Dear Colleagues,
I am working with Dominique Grisard at the University of Basel to organize a theme („Agency and Action“) session for the 2009 Social Science History Association meeting (Long Beach, CA, 12-15 November) on the topic of feminine passivity and agency. A brief description of what we have in mind is pasted below. Please respond to me if you would be interested in submitting an abstract for such a session.
More information about the Social Science History Association and this year’s meeting is available at http://www.ssha.org .
Best,
Marynel Ryan Van Zee
Co-Chair, Women and Gender Network
Social Science History Association
Female Passivity and Agency
Dominique Grisard, University of Basel, Organizer
In both liberal feminism and society at large, passivity is understood to be a non-activity associated with the subservience of feminine women and girls. In this view, passivity ultimately serves to reproduce gender hierarchies. On the rare occasion that passivity is acknowledged to be an activity, the focus tends to lie on passive aggressive women and girls. This session seeks to complicate the concept of passivity by looking at passivity as agency and action. Passivity is deployed by female identified women and girls in all different kinds of settings and for all different kinds of purposes. Hence, this session seeks scholars working on passivity as a conscious or unconscious strategy of resistance, compliance, protection, aggression etc. performed by feminine women and girls.
source: H-WOMEN@H-NET.MSU.EDU