{"word_count": 214, "character_count": 1561}
Call for Papers 2010 MESA Annual Meeting, San  Diego       Urban Livelihoods and Politics in the Middle  East      Widening income inequality, increasing labor  insecurity and changing forms of deprivation and exploitation have marked the end  of the 20th century across geographies. The Middle East region is not an  exception. Under the neoliberal economic restructuring, while informality and precariousness have become prevalent features of livelihoods for a  growing number of people, increasing rural to urban migration has made cities a  primary site for studying the impact of insecure livelihoods on individual and collective lives. This panel aims to explore the relations between  livelihoods and political subjectivities: How do individuals across class, age,  gender, and ethnic lines experience, adapt, and/or contest precarious livelihoods?  Do increasingly precarious livelihoods re-configure political alliances,  activism, and practices? How does labor insecurity shape the sense of identity of workers? What types of political mobilization and contestation emerge in  the cities? How do changes in economic relations shape perceptions of what  is just and unjust? We seek papers that address these questions. We particularly welcome empirical, preferably comparative, papers on changing  livelihoods as they relate to changing political subjectivities and practices in the  urban Middle East.Please submit paper abstracts (250-300 words) to Ayca Alemdaroglu (ayca@stanford.edu)  and Silvia Pasquetti (sipas@berkeley.edu) by February 10, 2010.