Call for Papers and Panel Sessions: 19th Annual Conference on Critical Geography
The Near Future: Volatility, Opportunity, and Critique
University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, NC, November 2-4, 2012
The
Geography
Department at UNC Chapel Hill invites you to join us in a discussion
about the future of the political. As struggles around the world capture
our collective imaginations, the legitimacy of existing social orders
and previously acceptable avenues of political
action have been called into question. What
comes next? What
connections between body and world, knowledge and practice, and
reclamation and revolt are working through and beyond the limits of the
current moment? What future worlds are emerging from the conflicts,
contradictions, and movements that characterize the
now? While informed by our mutual commitment to developing new
knowledge and practice that responds to these struggles, our task is to
commit focus to the discordant realities that inform our research and
political engagements with the world. We invite a wide
range of academics, non-academics, activists, and artists to present on
these volatile times and the possibilities they portend.
The
conference
will take place November 2-4, 2012 and will be hosted by the Department
of Geography at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. On
Friday, November 2nd, our opening plenary will feature Heidi Nast
(DePaul University). Arturo Escobar (UNC Chapel Hill)
will host a brunch conversation on possible political futures on Sunday
November 4, 2012, as our closing event.
Work,
Collaborate, Present
This
year, the
conference will be organized around four broad themes that foster
inquiries into the near future (see themes below). We encourage you to
propose panels that speak to the issues described here to foster
dialogue and collaboration. If your panel crosses more
than one theme or asks new or different questions, let us know and we
will work with you to make accommodations. Please let us know as early
as possible if you require additional technical support or if you have
questions about the conference.
Join
us in extending
the traditional conference proceedings by submitting proposals for your
work in a wide range of formats. We encourage paper presentations,
panel discussions, interactive workshops, collaborative roundtables,
visual presentations of film, dance and art, and
alternative offerings that generate new theory, practice and
opportunities for future work. Deadline for submissions is Friday, August 31.
Abstracts or proposals should be 250 words.
Please include contact information, titles, and
institutional/organizational affiliations. Also include information on
which of the themes below (1 through 4) your panel addresses. We
strongly encourage you to think about how your proposal can build better
connections between research and practice, particularly with
non-academic audiences.
Proposals can
be sent to: criticalgeography@unc.edu.
Additional
information
about the conference is coming soon. Please check back for additional
information about conference programming, and details regarding
logistics and accommodations.
We look forward
to seeing you in November!
Themes
(1) Occupation and
Decolonization in the Current Crisis
Three
years after the peak
of the financial crisis of 2008, people took a cue from the Arab Spring
uprisings and took to the streets of major US cities, highlighting the
plight of the 99% while denouncing the concentrated power of the 1%. We
invite papers and panels that address the
following: What are the contemporary dynamics of this crisis? What is
the relationship between the often-highlighted sector of finance in this
crisis, and the broader functioning of capital as a whole? What is the
composition of the contemporary struggles
responding to this crisis? And how might an attempt to shift the
theoretical and empirical focus from occupation to decolonization assist
or impede the conversation about building a movement that is most
likely to enact profound social change?
(2) Living and Dying
in a Material World
Political
ecologies, bio/necropolitical
analyses, and materialist engagements explore the making and
intertwining of social and natural worlds. Central to these inquiries is
the stuff of political life: how the political is constituted and
redefined around things/bodies and through contests over
ontology and meaning, and how this informs struggles over spaces,
resources, rights and territory, life and death. In what ways do
engagements with things/bodies allow us to rethink and address current
moments of crisis, be it financial, ecological, energetic,
institutional, or territorial? We invite work that provides a forum for
these debates and engagements, including but not limited to questions
of circulation and the movement of value, energy, waste, decay, and
consumption, metabolisms of nature and capital,
and geographies of crisis.
(3) Embodied Knowledge
as Practice
Feminist
geographers, queer
theorists, and a wide range of non-representational scholarship have
situated the body as a complex yet crucial focus of geography, calling
to task the political, economic, and social imbrications that are tied
up in the creation of bodies. Just as importantly,
work around the body brushes against the limits of the translatable,
raising both theoretical and methodological difficulties yet also
untested potentials, as bodies everywhere form new knowledges,
practices, and actions to meet the challenges of contemporary
precarity and flux. We invite work that either uses the body as a site
of empirical research or seeks to embody research-as-practice in ways
that push the boundaries of traditional research exploration and
presentation.
(4) Territories of
Resistance
Over
the last decades we’ve
witnessed a series of revolts on the world stage, ranging from El Alto
in Bolivia to the Arab Spring. We’re interested in papers that inquire
into these tremors, specifically: their relation to prior struggles,
neoliberalism, occupation, global colonialism,
war, and austerity; the geopolitical implications of their
international encounters; and the conceptions of space, claims to
territory and subjectivity, and visions of collective life at work in
them. We’re also interested in papers situated domestically,
where anti-neoliberal struggles – largely informed by the continued
legacy of race radicalism – have centered on the construction of just
cities. Often, communities of color are seen as mere objects of
neoliberal policy; in contrast, we are interested in papers
that recognize them as producers of viable post-neoliberal forms of
urban life.
