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Elizabeth Wingrove, University of Michigan
Stephen Engelmann, University of Illinois, Chicago
engel-wing@umich.edu

In keeping with this division’s capacious understanding of foundations, we welcome submissions that engage political theory from diverse methodological and historical perspectives. In keeping with the conference theme, we especially encourage papers and panels that take up questions pertaining to “the politics of hard times.” Political theory has itself been characterized as inseparable from crises: moments in which worldly events seem to exceed the sufficiency of available concepts and languages, and often radical transformations of political order are anticipated or feared. Submissions might thus investigate how foundational texts and categories illuminate hard times, both past and present. They might also address the adequacy of these foundations for conceptualizing our own hard times. How do contemporary events challenge our understandings of, for example, state, market, social relations, citizenship, political agency? Have political theory and political economy drifted too far apart? Can we describe and interpret our current condition using the existing languages of political-theoretical inquiry, or are we faced with the challenge of the unprecedented? Does talk of “hard times” itself invoke a set of assumptions about who or what counts, and “crisis,” assumptions about the ordinary? While we mean to underscore the wide range of topics and questions responsive to the conference theme, we are happy to receive proposals that do not readily fit under that rubric. We welcome submissions concerning any and all innovative inquiry into the concepts, texts, practices, ideologies, and rhetorics of political life.