CALL FOR PAPERS – EUROSEAS CONFERENCE, GÖTEBORG, Aug. 2010
"Victims, survivors, mourners, re-constructors: Southeast Asian responses to massive social destruction"
Convenors: Anne Yvonne GUILLOU (CNRS, France) and Silvia VIGNATO (Univ. Milano-Bicocca, Italy)
Contacts: anne.guillou@vjf.cnrs.fr ; silvia.vignato@unimib.it
Deadlines: February, 15, 2010: submission of the abstract and short résumé.
In the last decades Southeast Asia has experienced civil wars as well as major “natural” disasters (typhoons, earthquakes and tsunamis). This panel focusses on the aftermath of such massive collective deaths, especially seen in the long period. We would like to examine what happens after environmental, social and human destruction has happened with its load of psychological, physical and social suffering. More precisely, we are interested in how Southeast Asian societies live after catastrophes, what processes they go through in order to make sense of the disaster and to cope with the destruction.
This panel invites participation of scholars from different disciplines studying various scales and fields of suffering and repairing suffering. Nevertheless, we would like to call the applicants’ attention onto a few common themes.
Social resilience.
Outside or beyond international humanitarian aid or national policies, each local society sets up specific “devices” which aim at coping with trauma engendered by exposure to catastrophes: practices of mourning and other techniques of symbolic reconstruction. We call such devices “social resilience”.
Categories of suffering
Social units and individual bodies and psychisms are unequally hurt when a catastrophe occurs. We are interested in analyzing the dialectic between disrupture and continuity in social and individual lives, which is expressed by defining “trauma” and its remedies. Different uses of the category of “trauma” are liable to unveil sometimes contrasting definitions of normality. We assume that conceptualizing “trauma” is as important as conceptualizing “violence” or “victims”, and that in both cases southeast Asia can help general reflexion on such themes.
Policies of memory
Many mourning/remembering actions are being decided now in Southeast Asia. Who decides how, when, and by what means a war or a natural disaster are to be remembered ? How does it affect the planning of a future time ?
Helping and being helped
Nowadays, countries are never alone in managing their dead and violated citizens. Besides, even the meaning of notions such as citizenship and nationality must be questioned when international help steps in (or is forbidden to step in). We think the temporary or permanent presence of international helping structures has to be seen in its political and social role for the future generations.
We hope that a better picture of Southeast Asian social resilience stemming from this panel will set good ground for a permanent research group, liable to be funded by national and European agencies.
