The 13 chapters in this collection were specially selected from over 400 papers given at the ‘Shifting States’ conference at the University of Adelaide in Australia in 2017. The papers were selected on the basis of their empirically rich and theoretically engaging contributions to the theme.
The volume comprises an ethnographic examination of state agency and the relationships between surveillance, bureaucracy, infrastructure and personhood, making it relevant across a range of contemporary issues. Part I of the volume, ‘Dialectics of Security, Surveillance and Struggle’, examines trajectories of state organization and security in the context of late-capitalism and technological saturation. Examples here are taken from Aboriginal Australia and urban North America, and include discussions of militarisation, post-colonial settlements, and the politics of migration. Part II, ‘Ethnographies of Infrastructure: Assemblage, Experimentation and Mobilization’, presents ethnographies of industrial, energy, and transportation infrastructures, and uses these to think about how such large scale projects not only reflect government aspirations, but engender new realms for state-citizen engagements. Examples here are taken from Latin America, Post-Socialist Europe and South-east Asia, and examines issues of contingency, citizenship, and human security. Part III, ‘Sensory States, and their Contingent Citizenries’, explores the sensual life of state formations, opening up discussion of the politics of embodiment and affect. Examples here are again drawn from Australia, Europe and the Pacific, and include discussions of public health interventions, bio-medical power more broadly, and the politics of intimate relations. Moving seamlessly from the specific to the nation-wide, the volume develops new theoretical understandings of the state and will be of value for scholars of anthropology, political philosophy and political science.
