Power and Politics:  35th Annual Meeting

of the Social Science History Association

Chicago, Illinois, 18-21 November, 2010

SSHA CONFERENCE REGISTRATION

Conference registration is now open.  All participants must complete conference registration by August 10, 2010, and be a member of SSHA in good standing, to be included in the program.

SSHA CONFERENCE 2010 HOTEL INFORMATION

IMPORTANT!!!

SSHA recognizes that you have a number of options when securing hotel accommodations for the annual meeting.  It is important to keep in mind that SSHA has made a major commitment to the Palmer House Hilton in order to secure a large block of quality hotel rooms at competitive prices in a convenient location.  SSHA is legally bound to fill these rooms.  Not to do so has severe financial implications for SSHA, both in 2010 and in years to come and will almost certainly raise your costs of attending future annual meetings.  If you require a hotel in Chicago, we would appreciate it if you would reserve your room at the Palmer House Hilton hotel.

SSHA has a special group rate of $184 single occupancy, $198 double occupancy, per night plus tax.  The hotel has set up a special reservation site for the Social Science History Association.  To access the site and make your reservation “click here”!

Reservations can also be made by calling 1-800-445-8667 (U.S. only) or 1-312-726-7500.  Group rates cannot be guaranteed after October 15, 2010.

Please make your reservations early.

For more information on this year's conference, including Participant Guidelines and information on Exhibits and Advertising at the conference, see the link "Annual Conference" to the left.

35th Annual Meeting of the Social Science History Association

Chicago, Illinois, 18-21 November, 2010

Submission deadline: 15 February, 2010

Power and Politics

Conference submissions are no longer being accepted.  To check the status of your submission, either login to the conference submission site, or consult SSHA's system of scholarly networks and network representatives for further assistance.  Individuals who are new to SSHA may create an account for using the online submission site in the future.  For information on this year's conference, see the link "Annual Conference" to the left.

The 2010 Program Committee seeks panel proposals that will focus on Power and Politics. Power is a foundational concept in history and the social sciences, and just as clearly a contested one. Traditionally, the understanding of power as the capacity to enact one’s will against resistance and images of the coercive, central state apparatus held sway, and these are still compelling visions. More recently, we have seen the emergence of a rather different conception of power as a diffuse set of forces, at work in the practices of everyday life, which may entangle actors in their own subjection. Here, the analysis of power has expanded to include the constitution of domination outside the formal polity, in forms of inequality and difference such as race, gender, or sexuality, or in terms of capillary processes working through classification systems, therapeutic discourses, and other technologies of regulation. Similarly, notions of politics and the political are debated. Some focus on collective practices, formal and informal, directed at states, while others stress the ways in which “the personal is political,” or examine individual or smallscale acts of compliance, resistance or inauguration that may be carried into the polity. And which issues and relations are considered political is historically specific. Power and politics, then, have many faces, and we may trace their institutionalization in forms of rule and the formation of subjects in a broad array of spatial, national and historical contexts.

As historical social scientists and social science historians, we hail from many traditions and disciplines. But we share common ground in the weight we assign to historicizing our understandings of power and politics. SSHA is a site in which we may use our collective intellectual resources and disciplinary traditions to help us to challenge foundational concepts and conventional understandings within our own fields. More broadly, still, we can ask what the streams of social science history and historical social science imply for understanding power and politics in today’s world, and in the future.

The 2010 conference will be held in downtown Chicago, in the Palmer House Hilton. Chicago has served as a stage for some of America’s most memorable political events and has a rich history as a site of civil rights, labor, feminist, anti-war, student and other social movement organiz ing; many are fascinated by its municipal politics, its role in national partisan battles, and its emergence as one of North America’ s global cities. Thus, we also encourage panels and papers organized around Chicago themes. As ever, papers and panels on themes not related to the conference theme are also welcome.