Archive: Marzo, 2014

• Borders at the Interface – Jerusalem

BORDERS AT THE INTERFACE:

BORDERING EUROPE, AFRICA AND THE MIDDLE EAST

 

International Workshop

In Cooperation with the FP7 EUROBORDERSCAPES Consortium

Sponsored by the IGU Commission on Political Geography

 

DECEMBER 7 – 11

Beer Sheva and Jerusalem, Israel

 

FIRST CIRCULAR

In its geopolitical context, Israel is located at the interface of three major regions – Europe, Asia (the Middle East part of Asia) and Africa. The region itself is the interface of regions, cultures and the worlds great monotheistic religions, partly explaining the fact that it continues to be one of the world’s geopolitical shatterbelts and the focus for ethnic, religious and territorial conflict.

As well as being an interface, it is also a transition region, where cultures and peoples have mixed as they cross from one area to another. It is as much as cross-border region as it is a border , and this is reflected in culture, language and food.  Hybridity and meeting is reflected in notions of  Eurasia and Mediterranean as alternative places for cultural mixing along with political conflict.

 

In cooperation with the FP7 consortium on Euroborderscapes, the newly founded Geopolitics Chair at Ben-Gurion University, along with three dynamic research centers, the Herzog center for Middle Eastern Studies, the Center for the Study of European Politics and Society (CSEPS) and the Tamar Golan center for African Studies invite scholars with an interest in borders and in any one of the relevant regions to submit papers for an international workshop aimed focusing on the interface between the three regions. This will take place as part of the ever growing community of border scholars worldwide, ranging across the borders of the  academic disciplines and examining the changing significances and functions of borders as they cross cultures.

 

 

Tentative Itinerary

Dec 7-8: – FP7 Workshop and Meetings

Dec 8-9: – Conference Sessions, Ben-Gurion University

Dec 10: Field Trip – Borders and Geopolitics in Israel / Palestine

Dec 11: AM –Field Trip –  Borders, Territory and Conflict in Jerusalem

Dec 11: PM – Conference Sessions, Jerusalem.

The conference will start in Ben-Gurion University in Beer Sheba, will include two geopolitical field trips in areas of cultural and political contestation within Israel/Palestine and Jerusalem, and will conclude its final sessions in Jerusalem.

 

Scholars are invited to submit abstracts on the conference themes to the following email address:  reneny@post.bgu.ac.il no later than May 30, 2014.

 

There will be a conference fee of $120 to cover the main organizational costs and conference dinner. The  field trips will be covered by the conference organizers. Participants will cover their own travel and accommodation costs. If we succeed in raising enough sponsorship to cover other costs, the registration fee will be returned.

 

Final technical details and a Conference Website, will be sent in a second circular in June 2014.

 

REGISTRATION DETAILS:

 

Name:

Affiliation:

Email:

Title of Abstract:

Abstract:

 

 

• People Place Space Reader

We are pleased to announce the launch of the website, PeoplePlaceSpace.org, for the forthcoming The People, Place, & Space Reader, edited by Jen Jack Gieseking and William Mangold, with Cindi Katz, Setha Low, and Susan Saegert. The People, Place, and Space Reader includes both classic writings and contemporary research, connecting scholarship across disciplines, periods, and locations to make sense of the ways we shape and inhabit our world. Essays from the editors introduce the texts and outline key issues surrounding each topic.

 

In that there are specific online and open access components of the volume to share, I wanted to send on word via email. The editors are committed to open access (OA) to public knowledge and as such have made their introduction to the book and the twelve section introductions of the book available on the website. We provide links to OA versions of excerpted readings when possible.
We also embrace the best of the shifts in technology that a text not end on its physical pages. As such environmental social science experts in a wide range of areas have crafted online summaries and recommended reading lists on a wide variety of themes like those below. Throughout the spring, we will be announcing sets of new recommended reading lists on different topics along with other content that we are sharing about the book. The first of these lists includes the following:
 
Archives, Exhibitions, Art, and the Urban Public Gabrielle Bendiner-Viani
Children’s and Young People’s Participation in Political Spaces Jennifer Tang
Design and Social Responsibility William Mangold
Destabilizing the Map through Critical Cartography &Resistance Einat Manoff
Environmental Factors in Drug Use and Abuse Martin J. Downing, Jr.
Food, Psychology, and the Environment Christine C. Caruso
Health and Environment Meredith L. Theeman
Sustainability in Life, Place, and Justice Do Lee
Wayfinding, Movement, and Mobility Aga Skorupka
 
More about the volume:
 
The People, Place, and Space Reader includes both classic writings and contemporary research, connecting scholarship across disciplines, periods, and locations to make sense of the ways we shape and inhabit our world. Essays from the editors introduce the texts and outline key issues surrounding each topic. A companion website, PeoplePlaceSpace.org, provides additional reading lists covering a broad range of issues. An essential resource for students of urban studies, geography, design, sociology, and anyone with an interest in the environment, this volume presents the most dynamic and critical understanding of space and place available.
 
Please note that a discount flyer for purchase is forthcoming.

• East – West Borderscapes

EAST – WEST BORDERSCAPES.

IMPRINTS OF THE FIRST WORLD WAR ON THE EUROPEAN BORDER LANDSCAPES

Trieste, Italy / Koper-Capodistria, Slovenia

October 2 – 4, 2014

 

From October 2 – 4, 2014, the Association of Slovenian Geographers (ZGS), in co-operation with the Association of Italian Geographers (AGEI), the University of Trieste (UNITS), Italy and the University of Primorska (UP) will host the meeting of the IGU’s Commission on Political Geography (IGU CPG).  The conference will elaborate on spatial imprints of WW 1 on the European border areas. The meeting will consist of sessions and one-day excursion (including field-work related sessions). The conference locations are Trieste, Italy and Koper-Capodistria, Slovenia; the excursion will take participants to the WW 1 Isonzo battle fields, the EU award winning WW 1 museum in Kobarid, Slovenia and to places where post-WW 1 imprints of the have left substantial marks in the natural, cultural and political landscape of Europe. After the closing of the IGU CPG conference a round table discussion on Dark Tourism is envisioned at the location of the Faculty of Tourism Studies TURISTICA in Portorož-Portorose, Slovenia.

 

Subject:

The centennial of the beginning of WW 1 is the occasion to discuss the war tragedies and multiple effects of the post-WW1 political decisions. The spatial arrangements after WW1 have strengthened new political players in Europe and have produced new spaces of confrontation. For example, in the Alps-Adriatic Europe the fragmentation of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the geographical enlargement of the ItalianKingdom, and the evolution of Central European nation-states, induced by the US democratic ideals, have produced new borders and a variety of states on Europe’s political map. The post-WW 1 peace settlements in Europe are by some academicians and politicians still considered as unjust. Ethnic, economic and political boundaries do not coincide; the quest for territory was for a substantial amount of time the urge of irredentist fascist, national-socialist and communist regimes in the post-WW1 and WW2 era.

 

Building on a tradition of previous borderscape conferences, we are looking forward to examine the relationship between spaces of governance in places where substantial change has taken place (as the result of the winning powers). This conference will explore how the post-WW 1 order has impacted the European geographical space and their cultural substance. Political and cultural geography will be the mainframe of the conference. The conference should particular identify major arrangements which have been and still are experienced in the European border areas:

 

• Spatial and political imprints of past empires;
• Spatial and political imprints of post-WW1 nationalism;
• Imprints of WW1 and post-WW1 arrangements in contemporary politics, culture and economy.

 

Case studies from all European borderscapes are welcome. The discussion, and in particular the excursion, will take into consideration the reality of the Alps-Adriatic region where the “Battle of Caporetto” (Kobarid) became synonymous for a total defeat of a nation (for a short while). Other similar European topics and, in particular cross-cultural comparisons of imprints left in border spaces by war and post-WW 1 arrangements are welcome. We would also like to place the attention to the general political, ethnic and economic spheres resulting out of brutal facts as closed borders have for decades separated nations. Illegal migration turned, with the loosening of the regimes, into shopping tourism and finally into tourism with motives related to the WW 1 confrontation areas and arrangements resulting out of it. Key-note speakers will be invited.

 

Find HERE conference program and registration form

• 14th International ‘Lodz’ Political Geography Conference

Department of Political Geography and Regional Studies

 

University of Lodz and Silesian Institute in Opole

 

invite you to participate in

 

14th International ‘Lodz’ Political Geography Conference and Workshop of the Political Geography Commision of the International Geographical Union.

 
 

With a necessity to define the number of participants of the conference “Geographical-political aspects of the transborder conservation of natural and cultural heritage” for booking of accommodation and also determine subjects of the presentations in preliminary program, the organisers kindly ask the participants to send all needed information on a registration form till March 31, 2014.