Fw: H-ASIA: CFP AAA Annual Meeting: Panel on "China in Africa and Africa in China" San Francisco, November 14-18, 2012

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----- Original Message -----
From: "Linda Dwyer" <dwyer@MAIL.H-NET.MSU.EDU>
To: <H-ASIA@H-NET.MSU.EDU>
Sent: Thursday, March 01, 2012 9:46 PM
Subject: H-ASIA: CFP AAA Annual Meeting: Panel on "China in Africa and
Africa in China" San Francisco, November 14-18, 2012

> H-ASIA
> March 1, 2012
>
> CFP AAA Annual Meeting: Panel on "China in Africa and Africa in China" San
> Francisco, November 14-18, 2012
> *************
> From: Dr. Karsten Giese <giese@giga-hamburg.de>
>
> Dear colleagues,
> We hope the following call will find your interest!
>
> *Apologies for cross-posting*
>
> Call for Papers: Panel on "China in Africa and Africa in China: employment
> relations as border crossing" at the 111th AAA Annual Meeting, San
> Francisco, CA, November 14-18, 2012
>
> From November 14-18, 2012 the American Anthropological Association will
> host its Annual Meeting in San Francisco around the theme of "Borders and
> Crossings". We believe that the growing attention for China-Africa
> relations has an important contribution to make within this theme,
> especially regarding Chinese-African and African-Chinese employment
> relations. We invite paper proposals that approach cross-cultural
> employment relations of any constellation and across a broad spectrum of
> economic activities situated both in Africa and in China.
>
> Please send your paper proposal including abstract (no more than 250
> words), paper title, keywords, affiliation and contact details to
> thiel@giga-hamburg.de or giese@giga-hamburg.de by March 10 2012. We will
> immediately get back to you. We apologize for the narrow time frame, but
> full panel proposals have to be submitted to the conference organizers by
> March 15!
>
> Please do not hesitate to contact us for further details, and please
> forward this call to your colleagues who might be interested.
>
> Best regards,
>
> Karsten Giese, GIGA Institute of Asian Studies, Hamburg
>
> Alena Thiel, GIGA Institute of African Affairs, Hamburg
>
> -----------
> Panel Proposal
>
> Borders and Crossings
>
> 111th AAA Annual Meeting
> November 14-18, 2012
> San Francisco, CA
>
> and
>
> Society for the Anthropology of Work (SAW)
>
> China in Africa and Africa in China: employment relations as border
> crossing
>
> Chinese-African engagements are receiving increasing attention across
> academic and more popular publications. The Chinese presence in Africa in
> particular is notorious for its involvement in economic sectors as diverse
> as construction and infrastructural development (ODA and profit based),
> mining, agriculture, manufacturing, services and not least trade. While
> media reports about Chinese economic activities in Africa in general and
> with regard to labor conflicts in particular are overabundant, though
> often of doubtful truth-value, African entrepreneurs in China have
> received much less public attention. Pioneering African entrepreneurs
> employing Chinese labor have been sighted in trade, services (especially
> hotels and restaurants) and manufacturing in several places in China.
>
> Irrespective of geographic location on the African continent or in China
> and economic sector, all these activities share the experience of
> employment relationships working across differences in the areas of
> culture, wealth, work ethics (including unwritten rules and behavioral
> norms, obligations and entitlements), adherence to informal employment
> practices, codified labor law and international standards, to name only
> few potential divides.
>
> In this panel, we seek to understand the ways in which Chinese-African
> employment relationships in any of the above mentioned constellations do
> or do not manage to negotiate the borders between minority and majority
> cultures in the work place. We purposefully invite contributions from the
> entire spectrum of work experiences related to Chinese economic activities
> in Africa and African businesses in China.
>
> We expect questions around the issue of power relations and ideologies
> related to employment and work to be particularly relevant and defining
> for the dynamics of reaching across differences in the cross-cultural work
> place. For example, is the individual effort to translate multiple
> dimensions of unfamiliarity and adapt to more fundamental differences in
> the cross-cultural work context of Chinese-African employment shaped by
> the relative position of authority vested in the figure of the employer
> Does the latter create a monopoly over the interpretation of the
> employment relationship or are the sojourning employers compelled to adapt
> to pervasive local norms and ideologies due to their status as outsiders?
> Beyond the issue of power relations, which other reasons motivate actors
> to cross the limits of their familiar frames of interaction and engage in
> cross-cultural employment relations? Finally, if figurations in employment
> across cultural/ethnic borders are not fixed but negotiable, what is the
> potential of such interactions to transcend more wide-spread social
> prejudices and resentments?
>
> Karsten Giese
> GIGA Institute of Asian Studies / GIGA German Institute of Global and Area
> Studies
>
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