CALL for PAPERS
International Conference

«The Informal and the Formal in Times of Crisis: Ethnographic Insights»
International Urban Symposium, Commission on Urban Anthropology, and University of the Peloponnese
7-9 July 2017, Corinth, Greece

This Conference aims at understanding the roles and meanings of informal practices in the context of the current political and economic crisis in Western society. Using a notion of informality that encompasses the economic, the social and the political realms, this conference seeks to explore the importance of informal practices in cities and asks the key question Is the informal a panacea in times of crisis?

In today’s global scenario, urban settings are a dominant form of associated life that encapsulate the socio-economic impact of increasingly significant international regulations, and selective management of capital, knowledge and people. Over the last three decades, the crisis, and subsequent discredit, of polarized ideologies which had characterized international politics since the Second World War has apparently determined the supremacy of economics over politics, an acceleration of economic globalization and a progressive erosion of democracy. In many cases, however, politics in the form of authoritarian decision-making and superimposed adverse policies have jeopardised the democratic covenant and the attendant terrains of representation, responsibility and accountability in the exercise of the power to rule. This process has often brought about the loss of important parts of sovereignty, as wealthier nations and powerful supranational interest groups have been seen to bu lly weaker nations, often also resulting in ever-growing fiscal demands and withdrawal of credit throughout the social scale, which has often been paralleled by national and local governance riding roughshod over the broader society. At the micro-level, this combination of events has engendered harsh living conditions for many ordinary people. Major casualties have been individuals’ access to basic rights and governments into privileges; on the other hand, they have addressed informal exchanges of services, help, information, knowledge, and so on, that take place at the grassroots in response to ever-shrinking — sometimes factually nonexistent — social welfare systems. Gradations of these grassroots informal activities draw on access to community resources beyond official allocation; in the economic field, they defy attempts of the state to monitor, regulate and extract revenue from the production, circulation and consumption of goods. Empirical analysis has also suggested that in most cases we are
not faced with a duality between formality and informality because in many cases the two are intimately interlocked in people’s lives. In the economic field it has been found that the informal and the formal are complex interlinking and interacting sectors of one economy that may be lethally affected by the aforementioned difficulty, or in some cases by the impossibility to access capital.

In the above outlined scenario, informal activities and modes of exchange — economic and non-economic — have often grown and they may have contributed to people survival; in other cases, long-established informal economic activities have disappeared alongside informal exchanges, while secure formal employment has become a chimera for many and zero-hour contracts, unpaid «internships» and similar, variously named cons, have multiplied. At the same time, new forms of informality are emerging — particularly but not only in the «on-line world» — that appear to be acquiring the status of resource as they raise new challenges to the bullies and «roughshod riders».
This Conference will bring together high-quality ethnographic studies of these processes with the three-pronged aim of clarifying grassroots dynamics, contributing to a comparative analysis of the present situation and developing a theoretically viable discussion of potential way-outs.

The Conference welcomes contributions and panels from anthropologists and scholars from other disciplines and encourages participation of research students.

Abstracts (300 words maximum) should be emailed by the 27th of February 2017 to Dr Giuliana B. Prato (g.b.prato@kent.ac.uk), Dr Italo Pardo (I.Pardo@kent.ac.uk) and Dr Manos Spyridakis (maspy@uop.gr). Selected papers and panels will be announced by the 13th March 2017.

A selection of revised papers that speak to each other will be brought together for publication in a Special Issue of Urbanities. Revised papers not included in this Special Issue will be considered individually for publication in Urbanities.

Registration Fee
Registration fee, to be paid by 20th March 2017: 60 Euros.
Postgraduate students, on-site registration fee: 15 Euros.

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