The New Public Good: Affects and Techniques of Flexible Bureaucracies
23 – 24 March 2012
The Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities (CRASSH), Cambridge, UK
An enduring association with disenchanted Weberian iron cages has, too often, allowed for a dismissal of the study of bureaucracy. Recent anthropological work has brought attention to the increasing bureaucratisation of the world (e.g. Graeber 2006) and our collective submergence in ‘audit cultures’ (Strathern 2000), while ethnographies have shown the affective, intimate faces of specific bureaucracies (Bear 2007, Navaro-Yashin 2007, Stoler 2009). This conference draws attention to a largely neglected but central feature of late capitalism: the worldwide reconfiguration of bureaucratic formations on the premise of new public goods. Bringing together social scientists working on and around the theme of bureaucracy, straddling regions and organisational forms, it is envisaged that this conference will be the first of its kind to draw academic attention to the unanalysed global trend of what we term ‘flexible bureaucracies.’
Specifically, this conference asks what exactly is new about newly declared public goods such as transparency, accountability, devolution of power, efficiency, the offering-up of choice, the introduction of new technologies or the raising of measurable happiness? How do they manifest themselves through transformations in mundane administrative technologies? What sorts of affectivities are engendered by them? How do theoretical interventions on the penetration of neo-liberal political rationalities and technologies of governance intersect with observations on the gendered nature of bureaucracies or the structural violence that underpins them? What, indeed, are the unintended consequences of the profoundly political and moral alterations in the practice of rule that are being introduced in the name of new public goods? For instance, what is the impact of the utilisation of biometric ids by the Indian state in its disbursement of welfare provisions to the urban poor? Does this sophisticated technological fix render the state ‘transparent’, does it allow for faultless identification of wholly individualised subjects? What forms of changes are wrought – pragmatically and affectively – by the replacement of ‘traditional’ modes of bureaucratic identification of the poor (such as documents) with new high-tech identificatory techniques?
We invite papers from researchers detailing the alterations being effected in variegated bureaucratic formations via new and contested definitions of ‘the public good.’ The conference is inter-disciplinary in its orientation. We do not, thus, delimit submissions on the basis of disciplinary background. Ethnographic accounts of flexible bureaucracies are, however, particularly welcome. Please email a title, abstract of not over 250 words, academic affiliation and contact details to Laura Bear (l.bear [at] lse.ac.uk) and Nayanika Mathur (nm289 [at] cam.ac.uk) by October 21, 2011. Further details are available at http://www.crassh.cam.ac.uk/events/1706/
