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Call for Papers Theme: Worlds of Welfare Type: Interdisciplinary Conference Institution: Free University of Berlin Location: Berlin (Germany) Date: 9.–10.7.2015 Deadline: 10.1.2015 __________________________________________________ Western welfarism has constituted statemaking in the most capacious sense; it has been both a culture and a politics, indeed a human event of epoch-making proportions, the more so retrospectively as it confronts renewed challenges post-2008. A fuller, clearer picture of the welfare state in Europe and North America—one better adapted to the conceptual and moral demands of the twenty-first century—can be won only if we consider the welfare state as a simultaneously transnational and whole-society endeavor, taking into account ties and transfers between and within borders, groups, networks and ideological registers. Thus prompted by the dual imperative of contemporary politics and developments in scholarship over the past fifteen years, this two-day conference at the Free University of Berlin aims to cull the latest research on the Western welfare state broadly conceived. Papers that take a transnational or comparative perspective and/or bridge the study of formal/official/elite governance with that of working-class or popular culture are particularly desired. We wish to foster a multilayered dialogue between scholars in the humanities and social sciences, above all in order to find ways to reconcile more ethnographic approaches, those “from below,” with the recent gains in transnational or global methodology that sometimes seem to discourage the former. Possible guiding questions include: What have been the social, cultural, intellectual, legal and political repercussions of ameliorative state intervention since the late nineteenth century, and to what extent did these repercussions in turn form new, likewise catalytic causal webs between states? Under what guises has modern welfarism appeared in Europe and North America, between colony and metropole or in the wake of decolonization? How has modern welfarism been thought, practiced and lived, whether by worker, bourgeois, industrialist, reformer or bureaucrat? What has modern welfarism meant as an experience for those who helped to make it, whether as its architects, recipients or opponents, and how did intellectual or physical mobility shape this experience? The conference will feature a keynote and four thematically organized panels, final composition dependent on paper proposals. Provisional emphases, however, are as follows: “Law, power and social/civil rights”; “Culture(s) of the welfare state?”; “Social reform and state intervention as transnational phenomena”; “Western welfarism transposed/from outside,” the latter with non-Western or colonial/postcolonial contexts in mind. The conference organizers are able to offer high-quality accommodation for participants at the conference venue, including all meals on both days. The conference venue is situated about a half-hour from the city center. The conference language will be English. Those interested in presenting should send an approximately 300-word paper proposal and c.v. to [email protected] by 10 January 2015. Contact: Chase Richards Friedrich-Meinecke-Institut Freie Universität Berlin Koserstraße 20 D-14195 Berlin Germany Email: [email protected] __________________________________________________ InterPhil List Administration: http://interphil.polylog.org Intercultural Philosophy Calendar: http://cal.polylog.org __________________________________________________
