THE AUTHORITY OF KNOWLEDGE IN A GLOBAL AGE

In the first decade of the twenty-first century new fears have come to haunt the politics of the West, unforeseen in the post-Cold War confidence of the 1990s. Political optimism about the inevitable spread of capitalist markets and democratic government has given way to questions about the global hegemony of the United States, the threats of terror and war, and the reduction of freedoms in the name of security. For most people of the global south, the twentieth-century promise of progress no longer provides a rubric for making sense of their lives. In a world still committed to limitless consumption, the majority are losing even their power to consume. The dangers of organized violence, the proliferation of arms, epidemic disease, and ecological crisis seem to meet no sustained political response.

The newly apparent dangers of the present offer a profound challenge to the forms of social knowledge produced in the university. What kinds of critical thinking does the new politics of uncertainty call for and make possible? How do the established disciplines of social science and their methods of analysis frame significant issues for public debate? What are the powers and limits of these frames? What possibilities and risks arise from new interactions between governments and the academy, or between university experts and the lay knowledge of activists and concerned groups? Will American social science continue largely to export its forms of thought to the world, or are there new ways to learn from the political and intellectual debates of other regions?

The fate of the social sciences, both in the United States and abroad, has been the subject of wide discussion. Some argue that the production of knowledge is trapped in the disciplines, where the questions to be addressed are defined more by technical debates within increasingly specialized fields than by transformations in the wider world. The neglect of area studies, it is said, has isolated the social sciences from sources of knowledge outside Europe and North America. Academics in many countries appear to be marginalized from the public sphere, whose nature has been transformed by the spread of political think tanks, the increasing privatization of intellectual property, and the growth of the internet. The division between the humanities, the social sciences, and scientific expertise challenges our ability to grasp contemporary events, in which the cultural and the technological combine to create new socio-technical worlds.

The project on The Authority of Knowledge in a Global Age will bring together an international community of scholars whose work examines the current global conjuncture through the study of particular crises, transformations, cultural forms, social innovations, and modes of contestation. While contributing to the understanding of local experiences of the present political condition, the goal of our collective discussions will be to consider the changed conceptions of the social world, new political vocabularies, alternative understandings of agency and personhood, altered representations of the past and the future, and new claims for justice that arise from these experiences and from our efforts to explain them. The project also seeks to better understand the production, circulation, and legitimation of social knowledge on a global scale.

The three-year project is organized around successive annual themes, each of which corresponds to one of the classical divisions of social theory-the economic, the political, and the social. The intention is not to take these categories for granted, nor to reproduce the divisions between the disciplines of economics, political science, and sociology that were established in reference to them. Rather, it is to examine how the territory marked by each of these founding categories is being questioned or redefined, from within the social sciences and from outside. And it is to ask what new intellectual projects and innovative political understandings result from and contribute further to this process of redefinition.

The Authority of Knowledge in a Global Age Project is directed by Timothy Mitchell.

Year 1 (2004-2005): The Rule of Markets

The idea of the market represents an analytic model for understanding the world and a political project for its remaking. The dual role of the market concept, at the center of recent politics and recent intellectual endeavor, offers the opportunity to explore the ways academic, technical, and political worlds interconnect.

Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, the idea of the self-regulating market became the centerpiece of global economic policy, representing a universal rule and local discipline that no national government was supposed to escape. Understood as the mechanism by which competing individual interests are brought into equilibrium, the market also became a general social scientific metaphor. Its use spread from economics across a number of disciplines to explain almost any aspect of political and social life, from the rules of democratic politics to the calculus of family relations.

By the turn of the twenty-first century the neo-liberal political project had encountered a series of global crises and movements of opposition. In social science, equilibrium models have been challenged from within economics, and by other disciplines that have been able to show how markets are the product of specific histories, social networks, power relations, and cultural understandings. Scholars in science studies have examined how economic models help create the methods of calculation that make increasingly complex economic interactions possible. This opens up the question of how academic and techno-political worlds interact.

Year 2 (2005-2006): Politics of the Unprivileged

For most of the world, the rules of constitutional politics remain, at best, an abstract promise. Theories of democracy describe the aspirations possible for only a small number of people with privileged access to elite institutions. On the actual terrain of politics, however, where local communities deal with the diverse powers of government, people are inventing new ways to negotiate how they should be governed.

Many scholars now study the politics of the unprivileged, but little of this work is known to orthodox social science. What can be learned from these new political forms? Do they repeat the traditional patterns of everyday resistance to power, or have the extensive policing and bureaucratic powers of postcolonial and postsocialist states produced new kinds of political subject, summoning up new subaltern strategies?

Should the existing categories of political analysis-democracy, civil society, interest groups, and so on-be expanded to include these contemporary political forms? Or should we recognize, as some scholars now argue, that the existing categories refer to a historically narrow set of arrangements (including elite politics in many countries outside the West)? Instead of expanding those terms, can we learn from the politics of the unprivileged new concepts and categories for the study of politics?

Year 3 (2006-2007): Rethinking the Social

The possibility of something called "society" and its place as a dynamic element of human experience was once the founding problem of the social sciences. But the discipline came to take this object for granted as an underlying principle of intelligibility, and turned increasingly to study the numerous micro-sociologies, understood as manifestations of this underlying whole. Today, the social often appears only as the networks or strategies connecting individual agents, or as the "social capital" these individuals accumulate.

In many fields of study, however, the concept of the social has recently been reexamined. In social studies of science, the separation between the social and the technical, or the human and non-human, is a problem to be explored, rather than a boundary given in advance. In ecological studies, human actions form part of a larger eco-system, whose transformations reshape the social world.

Among anthropologists and historians, new questions have been raised about the understanding of the non-secular: If social science is founded upon a commitment to the secular nature of social knowledge, what problems does this entail for understanding the majority of the world's populations, whose lives are experienced as interactions with the divine or other forms of supra-human agency? Must the boundaries of the social world coincide with the limits of the secular? In these and other ways, a variety of contemporary scholarship is reexamining the boundaries of the social asking how they are constituted, transgressed, and transformed.

PROJECT ADVISORY COMMITTEE

Frederick Cooper, History
Faye Ginsburg, Anthropology
Manu Goswami, History
Walter Johnson, History
Eric Klinenberg, Sociology
Fred Myers, Anthropology
Mary Poovey, English
Mary Louise Pratt, Spanish & Portuguese Language & Lit
Debraj Ray, Economics
Xudong Zhang, East Asian Studies

FELLOWS

2006-2007: Rethinking the Social

Jane Anderson, Australia
"New Social Ordering: The Paradoxes of Intellectual Property"

Ulla Berg, NYU Dissertation Fellow
"Mediating Diasporic Communities: Cosmopolitan Campesinos and their Transnational Media Practices"

Julia Elyachar, Slovenia/United States
"Social Capital, the Evil Eye, and Contested Meanings of the Social in Egypt"

Maimuna Huq, Bangladesh
"Ambivalence in Certainty, Convergence amid Difference: Islamic and Secular Activisms in Bangladesh"

Hui Jiang, NYU Dissertation Fellow
"The Ethics of Dialogue: A Study of Zhao Shuli's Revolutionary Rural Fiction"

Patrick Joyce, Visiting Scholar
"The Soul of Leviathan: Making the Modern British Technostate"

Andrew Lakoff, United States
"Threats without Enemies: An Anatomy of Contemporary Security"

Alondra Nelson, United States
"Roots in the Age of Genomics"

Christopher Otter, NYU Faculty Fellow
"The Social and the Environmental: Engineering and Infrastructure in Britain and the World, 1800-2000"

Natasha Dow Schull, United States
"Neuroeconomics: From Synapse to Society"

Sherene Seikaly, NYU Dissertation Fellow
"Orange Groves and Department Stores: Consumption and Capitalism in Palestine 1920-1948"

Ella Shohat, NYU Faculty Fellow
"The Cultural Politics of the Middle East in the Americas"

Margaret Somers, United States
"From Poverty to Perversity: The Powers and Politics of Market Knowledge"

Miriam Ticktin, United States
"Between Justice and Compassion: The Politics of Immigration and Humanitarianism in France"

Weihua Wu, Hong Kong
"New Media, Ethnography, and Discourse of 'ke': Youth (sub) Cultures on the Chinese Internet"

Diana Yoon, NYU Dissertation Fellow
"U.S. Military in Asia and the Production of Imperial Citizenship"

2005-2006: Politics of the Unprivileged

Munir Fakher Eldin, NYU Dissertation Fellow
"Colonizing the Beisan Valley: Property, Sovereignty, and Spatial Hegemony in Palestine, 1882-1948"

Jangam Chinnaiah, India
"Whose Nation? Nationalism and Dalits in Telugu Country 1900-1950"

Valdimar Tryggvi Hafstein, Iceland
"Social Creativity and Intellectual Property: Traditional Knowledge, Authorship, and the Right to Copy"

Forrest Hylton, NYU Dissertation Fellow
"Insurgent Community Federalism and 'Race War': Political Representation and Territorial Sovereignty in Late-Nineteenth-Century Bolivia"

Natasha Iskander, Egypt
"Protesting to Innovate: Migrant Labor Mobilization and State-Society Practices of Knowledge Production in Mexico and Morocco"

Nivedita Menon, India
"Feminist Subjectivity in a Post-Gender World: A Study of Counter-heteronormative Movements in India"

Tavia Nyong'o, NYU Faculty Fellow
"Tough on Black Asses": Black Performers and the Political Economy of Jim Crow

Arzoo Osanloo, United States
"At the Juncture of Islam and republic: Women, Rights and Subjectivity in Iran"

Nina Siulc, NYU Dissertation Fellow
"Unwelcome Citizens: Criminal Deportees and Civic Life in the Dominican Republic"

Margaret Somers, United States, Visiting Scholar

Sinclair Thomson, NYU Faculty Fellow
"Indian Politics in the Insurgent Andes: Internal Colonialism, Nationalism, and Subaltern Struggle in Historical Perspective"

Leshu Torchin, NYU Dissertation Fellow
"The Burden of Witnessing: Visual Media and Mobilization in the Age of Genocide"

Alexei Yurchak, Russia
"The Politics of Irony After Communism: Artistic Displacements of Markets Ideologies in Russia"

2004-2005: The Rule of Markets

Zuhre Aksoy, Turkey
"Market and Genetic Diversity: The Case of Turkey"

Ozlem Atlan, NYU Dissertation Fellow
"The American Third World: Globalization and Local Acculturation of Elites in the Middle East"

Andrew Barry, United Kingdom, Visiting Scholar

Neil Brenner, NYU Faculty Fellow
"The Neoliberalization of Urban Governance in Western Europe? A Comparative Investigation"

Michel Callon, France, Visiting Scholar

Sherri Fink, United States, Visiting Scholar

Julie Graham, United States
"Inventing the Enterprise: Markets as Sites of Political Engagement and Economic Subjectivation"

LaDawn Haglund, NYU Disstertation Fellow
"Right to Light: State Autonomy, Accountability, and Utility Privatization in Central America, 1980-2003"

Chia Yin Hsu, NYU Dissertation Fellow
"Staging Europeanness in Harbin and the Russian Far East: Race, Modernity, and the Making of a Russian Colonial Order in China, 1898-1924"

Vincent Antonin Lepinay, France
"Stem Cells Banking: Production, Commodification, and Circulation of Human Body Parts"

Philip Mirowski, United States
"The Global Restructuring of Science as a Marketplace of Ideas"

Dieter Plehwe, Germany
"Taking the Market from Margin to Mainstream: How Neoliberals Organize to Produce and Mobilize Authoritative Knowledge"

Susanna Rosenbaum, NYU Dissertation
"Domestic Economies: Immigrant Domesticas, Middle Class Employers, and Household Work"

Allison Truitt, United States
"Dollarization and the Limits to Economic Reform in Vietnam"

Caitlin Zaloom, NYU Faculty Fellow
"The Discipline of Speculators: Trading and Technology from Chicago to London"

FUNDERS

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