If you are perusing this conference programme, the chances are that you have successfully registered for ECAS 4. On behalf of the AEGIS Board, I wish you an intellectually fulfilling and socially rewarding week of activities in the historic city of Uppsala. For those who have only recently discovered AEGIS, we hope that this will be the start of an enduring relationship. Although AEGIS is constituted as a network of Centres of African Studies in Europe, its core activities are intended to be as inclusive as possible.

The transformation of the locus of valuation of mass cultural objects in the context of the emergence of the market as organizing principle after 1989 is still an under-explored phenomenon. The starting point in this analysis is the idea of the transformation of the paradigm of the value of the mass cultural goods, in the context of passing from communism to capitalism. The transformation was quite abrupt, from setting the value of a cultural good according to the contribution to the official ideology, national culture or aesthetics (Verdery, 1995; Benjamin 1969), to its market value; the new American influence on the issue. The immediate consequence of the FTA signed by the CEE countries with the United States at the beginning of the nineties was the redefinition of cultural goods as merchandise. The balance was shifted from producer towards demand, and quite abruptly so. The market is the place where offer and demand meet; that has asprerequisite the freedom to choose and as result the 'just price' (Kołakowski 2005: 219–220). After the fall of communism CEE countries entered in the larger picture of deregulation in the name of the newly gained freedom. The ideas driving the opening after the fall of communism were congruent to the classical liberal positive connotations of a free press. Nevertheless, there has not been enough problematisation of the redefinition of the cultural goods as merchandise and the profound mutations that this situation entails. One of the most important misfits that I wish to discuss is the institutional one. In Romania, for example, the institutions that are called to deal with mass cultural goods are in the realm of culture, the French foundation of institutional legacy, while the object, the cultural object, has migrated to the market, the economic realm. Benjamin, Walter. Illuminations, Fontana Press: London, (1992) [1955]. Kołakowki, Leszek. Main Currents of Marxism. New York: W.W. Norton & Company 2005 [1978]. Verdery, Katherine. National Ideology under Socialism: Identity and Cultural Politics in Ceausescu's Romania (Society and Culture in East-Central Europe).LA: University of California Press, 1995."

Based on recent fieldwork data, this paper explores the practical and theoretical implications of everyday ICT (such as mobile phones and the Internet) used by Indian nurses, who migrated for work from Kerala to the Middle East, to provide care to their elderly parents remaining at home. Around the world, ICT is becoming increasingly used in care provision at a distance, for example to chronic patients, through projects implemented by health care institutions. But what about ICT use in informal care provision at a distance within families? This paper examines the use of everyday ICT, such as mobile phones and the Internet, to provide care to the elderly in Indian transnational families. In India, life expectancy is increasing, which contributes to significant population ageing and raises important concerns in terms of health provision, organization and financing. At the same time, Indian women increasingly migrate abroad as nurses to provide care for somebody in a foreign country while leaving their dependent children or elderly parents behind, a phenomenon known as global care chains. In this context, the use of everyday ICT has contributed to the emergence of transnational social space, where everyday life practices and social networks are maintained across countries and often continents. The combination of intensified migration and increased availability and accessibility of everyday ICT has also had a significant impact on care. Based on recent fieldwork data, this paper focuses on what happens to care practices for the elderly when physical distance is introduced in the relations between family members, and how ICT are used to mitigate this distance. By describing specific examples of ICT use for care in Indian transnational families, the author investigates how care is provided to the ageing body at a distance."

A few weeks before the publication of psychiatric manual DSM-5, in April 2013, Director of the NIMH Thomas Insel wrote in his blog that the patients suffering from mental disorders deserve better than a manual which validity is inadequate because not solidly founded on genetics and neuroscience. Widely publicized on the web, Insel's post advocated a new method introduced in 2009: « NIMH has launched the Research Domain Criteria (RDoC) project to transform diagnosis by incorporating genetics, imaging, cognitive science, and other levels of information to lay the foundation for a new classification system ». RDoC aims at accelerating the translation of knowledge from basic research to clinical practice. Translational psychiatric neuroscience is at the heart of European and US research policies and deserve close attention from a social studies of science and medicine perspective because, I will argue in this paper, it is part of the new sociotechnical imaginaries (Jasanoff & Kim, 2009) of contemporary mental health systems. In this paper, I will study the needs, promises and critiques that translational neuroscientists face when dealing with mental disorders as an object of study. Drawing on expert interviews of clinicians-researchers and on a review of the literature on RDoC, I will explore the narratives of the future, and how the translation gap or lag appears in these narratives, together with its solutions (transforming diagnosis, better interdisciplinarity, knowledge brokering…). This paper proposes a sociology of translational psychiatric neuroscience which maps the envisioned futures incorporated in today brain science.

Book of Abstracts & Conference Overview

ICCG 2015 in Ramallah, Palestine Session: Occupy Movements: A Survey of Alternatives Title: Surplus of Political Collective Action in Urban Resistance Keywords: J.K.Gibson – Graham, surplus, affect pedagogy, transversal methods We find ourselves at a stage in global history where local movements consisting of self-organized collectives are attaching themselves to translocal networks capable of creating rhizomatic dissemination and surplus. At the same time, the Occupy movements in different cities have introduced a realm of communal practice of difference that has gathered already existing collective resistance practices. This paper intents to draw an analysis of Occupy movements in context of economic geographers J.K.Gibson – Graham’s formulation of “political collective action”. We do speak about an uncommon knowledge that we create, a new instituting power, alternative urban pedagogy and a collective labor. In this context, community economies and surplus dissemination processes, in the sense implied by J.K. Gibson-Graham, are of particular importance. For political collective action requires "working collaboratively to produce alternative economic organizations and spaces in place."(1) Collective action requires the ethics of a community economy. In fact, I would articulate this more as an act of ethics of locality that meets the needs suggested by our everyday knowledge and the experience of safeguarding our livelihoods in both urban and rural spaces. The relational network established as a result is more of an instant community that chooses to think and discuss together rather than a normative structure. Self-organization is not a simple hierarchy based on certain labor activities and their division but, conversely, a work/labor structure that allows one to be a farmer in the morning and a graphic designer in the afternoon. To refer architect Stavros Stavrides's analysis, collaboration is not about affirmation, but negotiation. It is about debating critical issues in an urban space, where space itself is a pressing and compelling concern. The paper is aiming to ask and discuss questions: How surplus operates in practice of urban commons? What are the transversal methodologies and the “affect” pedagogy? The paper will conclude with examples from Istanbul/Turkey, of practices and methods by video-urban activists, researchers and local networks. (1) J.K. Gibson-Graham, The End of Capitalism (As We Knew It), Minnesota Press, 2006

This article examines the central, but neglected principle of solidarity in human rights, health and bioethics, a concept subject to contention, evasion and confusion. It addresses the general ambivalence toward solidarity within law, philosophy and politics, by discussing solidarity’s co-evolution with inegalitarian encapsulations and divisions of human rights. It argues that a renewed conception of solidarity is essential to meet increasingly salient ethical demands, as gender equality and the individualization of responsibilities coincide with deficits of care and collective responsibility. Questions of embodiedness, (inter)dependence, care and asymmetry are neglected by dominant liberal approaches, but are key to rethinking solidarity.

The intricate linkages between power and knowledge shape human identities. Identity is fluid and a construct of various technologies of power being exercised on individuals that turn them into objects and subjects. The later Foucault demonstrates subject formation through two major technologies- ‘domination’ and ‘self’. This paper uses Foucault’s opus as a toolbox to analyse the process of socio-cultural change among the Nicobarese, an isolated indigenous community of India, in the context of their post tsunami subjectification through the governmental humanitarian interventions. It concludes these interventions as tacit maneuvers of modernization which reconfigured the Nicobarese subjectivity through a politics of spatiality, and ushered change in their traditional socio-cultural fabric. In Foucauldian understanding, the post tsunami humanitarian interventions were an ensemble of the technologies of power which envisaged the Nicobarese transformation along the lines of a modern culture. The indigenous practices, decisions and aspirations were conducted by government in such a manner that the community started conducting its own conduct through the technologies of self.