Public Administration Theory Network

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For the 2012 conference call for papers and panels click here.

Larry Luton is new the editor of Administrative Theory & Praxis! Congratulations to Larry and his editorial team, Jennifer Eagan, Jennifer Alexander, Louis Howe, and Domonic Bearfield.

Proposed PAT-Net Bylaws are available for review and comment here.

The conference keynote address given by Orion White, “Whenever Two Or More Are Gathered: Relationship As the Heart of Ethical Discourse,” is available here. David Farmer's keynote address, "Public Administration in Perspective: Epistemic Pluralism" is available here.

The first six volumes of the original Dialogue are now available gratis here. The entire Dialogue and ATP archive is now accessible via J-STOR.

The image in the website's header is Ambrogio Lorenzetti's Effects of Good Government on City Life, Palsazzo Publico, Siena, Italy. It is part of a larger series of frescos. The image is in the public domain and used under the terms of Wikimedia Commons.

About ATP‎ > ‎Calls for Papers‎ > ‎

Colonization

Write, form a rhizome, increase your territory by deterritorialization, extend the line of flight to the point where it becomes an abstract machine covering the whole plane of consistency.
--Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia

Deleuze and Guattari advocate a way of avoiding colonization by way of perpetual motion, a mode of hybridity or flight that resists concrete identity or fixed location. They claim to capture the upside of colonial movement, migration, without the liability of settling into someone else’s territory. What forms of colonization come into play in public administration theory and practice? What are the consequences of these kinds of colonization? This Forum seeks reflections on various notions of colonization, their effects, and their relationship to public administration theory and practice. Questions that authors might address include:
  • What are the various forms of colonization that we encounter in the public sphere (material, ideological, psychological)?
  • What forces are colonizing the public sphere? Does privatization amount to a kind of colonization?
  • What constitutes the “territory” of PA?
  • What are the conditions that we want to protect by resisting colonization?
  • How can public administrators think beyond the organization structures that they inherit?
  • Can colonization be a good thing?
  • Is public administration itself a colonizing endeavor?
This Forum will appear in the December 2010 issue of ATP. Please send submissions of approximately 2,000 words to Jennifer Eagan, Forum Editor, at jennifer.eagan@csueastbay.edu by July 1, 2010.