Call for participants for Seattle:

Engaging the Gap between Policy and Practice

Planned in-person panel to be submitted to the Association for the Anthropology of Policy

This panel seeks to explore what happens between the creation of a policy and its implementation. Authors have noted that the intended and actual outcomes of a policy often differ, that policies transform and travel. Shore and Wright (2011: 1), for example, write that a “policy finds expression through sequences of events; it creates new social and semantic spaces, new sets of relations, new political subjects and new webs of meaning.” One could argue that policies are negotiated along the way, in a space that scholars such as Thedvall (2019) and Crewe and Axelby (2013) have called the “gap.” Renita Thedvall (2019: 1), for example, argues that “putting the gap at the center reveals not only the disjuncture of the gaps but also the productiveness of the gap,” viewing this as a creative space for policy transformation, as a liminal space really (Turner 1966/1995), as something in-between policy and practice. 

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This panel invites papers that place the “gap” in the center of their analysis. May it be in the form of areas forgotten about by a specific policy, groups deliberately omitted from the policy, or a disjuncture between intended and actual outcomes. We hope to engage the “gap” as a central point of analysis to understand how policies travel and transform; in what way policies engage the lives of people, nonhumans, and the environment. What can we learn about the lives of policies by an engagement from the vantage point of the “gap”?

Please send draft titles and abstracts (250 words) to rasmus.rodineliussen@socant.su.se by Wednesday, March 23rd.

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Discussant: Renita Thedvall

 

References

Crewe, E. And Axelby, R. 2013. Anthropology and development: culture, morality and politics in a globalised world. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 

Shore, C. And Wright, S. 2011. Conceptualising Policy: Technologies of Governance and the Politics of Visbibility. In Policy Worlds: anthropology and the analysis of contemporary power. Shore, C., Wright, S. And Peró, D. (eds.). New York: Berghahn Books.

Thedvall, R. 2019. Blend Gaps through Papers and Meetings? Collaboration between the Social Services and Jobcentres. Social Inclusion, Vol. 7:1: 218-227. 

Turner, V. W. 1995. The ritual process: Structure and anti-structure. New York, NY: Aldine de Gruyter (Original work published 1966).