Call open for the dossier Rethinking public policy: grammars of power and contemporary inequality

Organizers: Javier Rodríguez Mir (Universidad Autónoma de Madrid) and João Mouzart de Oliveira Junior (Universidade de São Paulo)

In a global context marked by intensifying health, environmental, economic, and political crises, public policy has established itself as a strategic field of analysis for understanding how populations are governed, how inequalities are produced, and how complex social issues are addressed.

This dossier seeks contributions that offer a critical reflection on public policy, considering its practical, relational, and situated dimensions. It views public policy as a dynamic process shaped by the actions of multiple actors—such as the State, international organizations, social collectives, and local communities—as well as by the conflicts that define its implementation and effects. The dossier aims to showcase research examining how power manifests in everyday life, highlighting the tensions, ambivalences, and contradictions inherent in public policy, which often simultaneously produce protection and control, recognition and stigmatization, promotion of life and abandonment.

We particularly welcome work that adopts transdisciplinary perspectives to critically examine the State and its intervention mechanisms, analyzing public policy as a force shaping lives, bodies, and territories. Additionally, we value studies that explore tensions between different knowledge regimes, modes of intervention, and ways of inhabiting the world, paying attention to the epistemological, political, and cultural conflicts involved in public policy. We also highlight contributions that analyze both the logics of regulation and control and the practices of resistance, appropriation, and the creation of alternatives by individuals and social collectives. Thematic areas (non-exhaustive):

• Anthropology of the State: ethnographies of public policies.
• Biopolitics and necropolitics: state management of health, the body, and diversity.
• Territories and habitat: housing policies, urban planning, the environment, environmental racism, and disputes over public space.
• Structural inequalities: institutional racism, and gender and class inequalities regarding access to rights.
• Subjects and forms of knowledge: education, childhood, youth, and institutional socialization processes.
• Boundaries of citizenship: migration, vulnerable populations, regimes of exclusion, and forms of resistance and agency vis-à-vis the State.
• Experiences and resistance: the agency of public policy subjects.
• Bureaucracy and specialized knowledge: institutional practices and regimes of expertise.

We welcome contributions from various institutions and regions in Brazil and abroad, prioritizing the intersection of anthropology with other fields in the humanities and social sciences. We accept submissions in Portuguese, Spanish, and English.

You may also submit work on a rolling basis to the OPEN SECTIONS. In this case, submissions should be made under the ARTICLE, TRANSLATION, BOOK REVIEW, or INTERVIEW sections. Translations, reviews, and interviews—even those addressing the dossier's theme—must be submitted to their respective sections.

Submission deadline: March 15, 2027