The New Public Good: Affects and Techniques of flexible Bureaucracies
Friday, 23 March 2012 to Saturday, 24 March 2012
Location: CRASSH, Alison Richard Building, 7 West Road, Cambridge CB3 9DT

Programme

Friday, 23 March

 

9.00 - 9.30

Registration

9.30 - 12.00

Plenary Panel: Debating the New Public Goods

Laura Bear (LSE): Making the New Public Good: Publicity, Friendship and Public-Private Partnerships on the Hooghly River

Brenda Chalfin (Florida): 'The Right(s) to Shit': Public Toilets and the Infrastructure of Bare Life on Ghana's Urban Periphery

Akhil Gupta (UCLA): Biopolitics, Infrastructure, and Public Goods

Matthew Hull (Michigan): Paper, Databases and the Ontology of Land Holdings in South Asia

Chair: Harri Englund (Cambridge)

12.00 - 13.00 

Lunch 

13.00 - 15.00 

Panel 2: Ambiguity, Transparency and Information

    Gemma John (Manchester): The Flexible Person, Transparency and the Making and Unmaking of Bureaucracy in Scotland

    Nayanika Mathur (Cambridge): Transparent-making Documents and the Crisis of Unimplementability:  a rural employment law and bureaucracy in Himalayan India

    Prashant Sharma (LSE): The Right To Information Act in India: Bureaucratic Resistance Revisited

    Discussant: Sian Lazar (Cambridge)

    15.00 - 15.30 

    Tea 

    15.30 - 17.30

    Panel 3: Corruption as Ethical Governance

      William Gould (Leeds): "That venerable and wonderful Institution dustooree”: Custom, daalii and influence in the bureaucracy of late colonial/early independent north India

      Hannah Brown (LSHTM): Moral Practice, ‘Public Goods’ and ‘Managerial Goods’ Among Health Managers in Western Kenya

      Paula Haas (Cambridge): Does Too Much Transparency Lead to Opacity? A study of corruption in Inner Mongolia

      Discussant: Akhil Gupta (UCLA)

       

      Saturday, 24 March

       

      9.30 - 12.00

      Panel 4: Measures of Performance: Efficiency and Flexibility

        Stefan Dorondel and Mihai Popa (Max Planck): Bureaucratic Flexibility and the Translation of Neo-liberal Policies: moralities and public welfare in rural Romania

        Olaf Zenker (Bern): Failure by Numbers? Settlement statistics as indicators of state performance in South African land restitution

        Ayaz Qureishi (SOAS): The Marketisation of HIV?AIDS Governance: vertical health programming, public private partnerships and bureaucratic cultures in Pakistan

        Noa Leuchter (Ben-Gurion University of the Negev): Along Efficient Lines: negotiating state authority in an Israeli state-bureaucracy

        Discussant: Brenda Chalfin (Florida)

        12.00 - 13.00 

        Lunch 

        13.00 - 15.30

        Panel 5: The Public Good and Privatising Ethics

          David Bholat (Newcastle University): Re-working the 'Northern' in the Rock

          Fiona McConnell (Cambridge): Professionalising the Exiled Tibetan Bureaucracy in India

          Jennifer Telesca (NYU): Consensus for Whom? Public goods governing marine life in the Atlantic

          Trevor Stack (Aberdeen): Shifts in the rationale of government in Mexico

          Discussant: Matthew Hull (Michigan)

          15.30 - 16.00 

          Tea 

          16.00 - 18.30

          Panel 6: Citizenship: Material and Affective Exchanges

            Umut Yildrim (Sabanci University Istanbul): The Affective Beyond of Bureaucracy: accessing aid in Diyarbakir

            Alexandra Schwell (Wien): Actually We Don’t Have Terrorists in Poland: how the EU shapes bureaucratic constructions of security

            Manpreet Janeja (Copenhagen/University of Cambridge): School Meals as Flexible Bureaucracies in East London

            Anna Tuckett (LSE):  Learning to play the game: migrants’ everyday encounters with Italian immigration bureaucracy in Bologna

            Discussant: Liana Chua (Brunel)