Conference: April 23-25, 2009
Reconsidering American Power
A conference organized by the workshop on Science, Technology, Society & the State
DESCRIPTION
In the STSS Workshop’s 2008 conference on Anthropology and Global Counterinsurgency, participants analyzed and interrogated new relations among American power, geopolitics, military interventions and anthropological practice. This year, we want to broaden the issues to the future of American power and the social sciences generally. Our conference, “Reconsidering American Power” asks a difficult, timely question: In the face of two ongoing hot wars and after a potentially transformative election, what now?
The papers that constitute the conference unite a concern for specific practices of knowledge production with the questions that adumbrate contemporary political and ethical/moral horizons of possibility.
The first day of the conference is broadly defined by the rubric “Disciplines and Deployments: American Academics and American Power.” For this day, the focus will be on what US social science disciplines have done and can do to influence both the ends and means of contemporary US power, and, in turn, the influence of the history of US power on the US social sciences.
The first panel, “Emergent Problems in the New American Century,” initiates our reconsiderations through an interdisciplinary discussion of the dilemmas and political horizons of possibility that define the present and near future. Following this, our plenary session, “Reconceptualizing the Question: Intervention Strategies,” interrogates the heart of the problem itself, with two nuanced criticisms of both the ends and means of American power in recent deployments. In this first panel, we are proud to feature papers by Roger Myerson and Marshall Sahlins, each addressing failures of American military intervention from their own disciplinary point of view. A double panel will then follow on “Uses and Abuses of Social Sciences: Disciplines of and for What?” The scholars in this panel, including anthropologists, historians, and political scientists, will revisit the critical, often fraught relationship between the American academy and the American state with careful attention to the pasts, presents and possible futures of their own disciplines.
The second day of the conference reorients our reconsiderations to transnational perspectives on American power and its relationship to global cultural, political, and economic formations. Each of the panels and on this day, including a summary roundtable, fall generally under the rubric “Is There a New World Order?”
The first morning panel, “Practices and Projections of American Power,” addresses the local realizations of American military, political and economic influence, both historically and contemporarily. The day’s second panel, “Cultures of the Military, Cultures for the Military,” returns to the theme of the cultural turn of the US military, to further explore how culture as a category has become a hallmark feature of contemporary American military culture itself.
Finally, the conference closes on an open-ended, Tolstoyan note with a capstone roundtable discussion, titled “Bretton Woods, Bandung and Beyond...What is to be Done, by Whom?” Here, in brief orienting presentations, panelists will contextualize questions of global power in the age of Pax Americana with reference to watershed moments, starting with the Bretton Woods Agreements of 1944 and the Bandung Asian African Conference of 1955. Drawing together the themes of the two days, participants will be invited to comment on the current and future missions of the social science disciplines in light of real changes in the world of Pax Americana.