• Geographies of Violence CFP
09 Dicembre 2014
CFP: “Geographies of Violence” – The Worlds of Violence – 9th Pan-European Conference on International Relations, 23-26 September 2015, Sicily, Italy
Simon Springer
University of Victoria, BC, Canada
Philippe Le Billon
University of British Columbia, BC, Canada
In carrying forward the ‘Violence and Space’ sessions that we organized for the AAG in Los Angeles in 2013, we wanted to bring more attention to geographical scholarship on violence by reaching out beyond the confines of human geography and encouraging a more interdisciplinary conversation. With this in mind we are assembling a 10 panel Section on the theme of ‘Geographies of Violence’ for the upcoming ‘The Worlds of Violence – 9th Pan-European Conference on International Relations’, which will be held 23-26 September 2015 in Giardini Naxos, Sicily, Italy.
Studies on the geographies of violence have rapidly increased in number over the past decade, both within and outside the discipline of geography. Reflecting greater sensitivity to multiple forms of violence and their spatial dimensions, this growing interest has responded to renewed violent forms of imperialism, debates about the trends of violence, and renewed methodological interest in spatial analysis.
Engaging this broad literature, this Section will consider the theoretical implications and empirical groundings of violence with the aim of more rigorously demonstrating the ways in which violence is woven through everyday lives, institutions, and structures. As such, the included themes range from a discussion of racism and genocide, sovereignty, neo-colonialism and development, gender inequalities, terror and territory, political ecology, war and militarism, displacement, geopolitics and subaltern resistance. Conceptually the Section will raise issues ranging from routinized performances and banal geographies of violence that serve conventional social, economic, and political norms that go largely unnoticed, through to the spectacular eruptions of ‘exceptional’ violence that capture public attention. By forwarding an agenda for the study of violence from a geographical perspective, we hope to demonstrate the myriad ways in which violence is relationally embedded within the human experience, a process that we envision will support greater understanding of pathways towards nonviolence and peace.
The 10 included Panels are as follows, each of which will include 5
speakers/papers:
1. Development, Neo-colonialism, and Violence
2. Race, Hate, and Genocidal Geographies
3. Geopolitical Violence and Subaltern Resistance
4. The Political Ecology of Violence
5. Sovereign Violence and Spaces of Exception
6. Geographies of Gender(ed) Violence
7. The Violence of Displacement
8. Geographies of Militarism and War
9. Terror, Terrorism and Geography
10. Peace and Nonviolent Geographies
We encourage submissions from scholars writing on any of the above named themes. In your submission, please identify which one of the identified 10 Panels you would like your paper to be considered for.
Abstracts of approximately 200-250 words should be sent to both of the organizers at springer@uvic.ca and philippe.lebillon@ubc.ca
Please note that at the same time you email your abstracts to the organizers you will also need to register and submit your abstract through the conference’s online system found here:
More details about the conference, including travel, accommodation, venue, and location details can be found on the conference website here:
The deadline for receiving abstracts is January 15th, 2015.
• 7th International Conference of Critical Geography CFP
09 Dicembre 2014
NB: Deadline extended to 20 December 2014
Open Call for Participation
7th International Conference of Critical Geography
‘Precarious Radicalism On Shifting Grounds: Towards a Politics of Possibility’
26-30 July 2015 | Ramallah, Palestine | www.iccg2015.org
ANNOUNCEMENT
The sense of revolutionary times triggered by recent events such as the Greek revolts, the Indignados and Occupy movements, as well as the Arab uprisings and the Idle No More protests in Canada, has been gradually overshadowed by a wave of virulent and violent responses by both state and global powers. Although these and other struggles have captured our imagination, an anxious feeling of being in a permanent state of crisis seems to have taken over as we observe an increase in and normalization of socio-economic and spatial inequalities and political repression against the population. This regression, which takes the form of a rise on authoritarianisms, revanchists’ responses, encroachment of fundamental rights, precarity of subsistence, social relations, employment, or the consolidation of populist right wing and fundamentalist movements, is to a large extent eclipsing and undermining the political space and fundamental work of individuals, communities and movements around the world. It certainly is a precarious time for radicalism. This grim landscape inevitably raises crucial questions about the current moment and its prospects. Are we witnessing and experiencing a fundamental historical shift? If so, how are we to interpret this transition? Or can these times be transformed into a moment of political possibility by reconsidering and/or expanding existing paradigms as well as by reconnecting solidarities and struggles?
The aim of the 7th International Conference of Critical Geography (ICCG 2015) is to provide an inclusive venue for the discussion of these and other themes that examine the geographies of critical social theory and progressive political praxis. Despite the significance of the issues at stake, we hope to create a fun, engaging and friendly atmosphere that welcomes a wide array of scholars, activists, artists, organizers and others interested in critical socio-spatial praxis.
CALL FOR PARTICIPATION
The ICCG 2015 will be organized around nine main themes (see below) that connect to and expand the conference underlying subject, that is ‘Precarious Radicalism On Shifting Grounds: Towards a Politics of Possibility’.
Deadline for submissions is 20 December 2014. We invite you to submit paper abstracts and encourage proposals for populated panels, roundtable discussions, or sessions with alternative formats that address the proposed conference themes. As indicated in the application form, we ask that you include (a) information on which conference theme your panel or paper addresses; (b) title of your paper or session; (c) a brief bio (max. 100 words) of each participant with contact information, institutional affiliation, and any titles you would like placed in the program; (d) an abstract (max 500 words). Please take into consideration that proposed activities should fit into the 90-minutes time-slots. Feel free to issue your own Call for Panels through appropriate mailing lists such as CRITICAL-GEOG-FORUM, URB-GEOG-FORUM, CRIT-LAG-GEOG, LEFTGEOG, PYGYWG, H-NET, etc. before submitting to us.
The forms for Application for Paper and Application for Panel can be found under www.iccg2015.org/call/
Please read the conference’s political statement before submitting your applications.
Selection decisions will be announced by 20 January 2015.
Send questions and proposals to submit@iccg2015.org
CONFERENCE THEMES
1 | Imperial, Colonial, Postcolonial and Anti-colonial geographies
Topics of interest include, but are not limited to, the following: colonial, anti-colonial, and post-colonial legacies and contestations; colonial cities/urbanism; political economies of colonialism/occupation; settler colonialism past and present; apartheid across borders and epochs; indigenous activism and revolutionary movements; securitization, militarization and privatization of space; land grabs; urban warfare and the war on terror; critical geopolitics, etc.
2 | Articulations and spaces of capitalism
Topics of interest include, but are not limited to, the following: financialization of capital and space, economies of urban development; alternative economies/economic alternatives; extraction industries and primitive accumulation; debt/credit economies; social reproduction and work; “free”, unpaid and slave labour in the 21st century; undocumented, informal and transnational work; (new forms of) labour struggles and unionism; class struggles and new conceptions of class; state interventions in the lives of economies, etc.
3 | Migration, Mobility and Displacement
Topics of interest include, but are not limited to, the following: immobilities, regulating mobilities, borders, migrant and refugee subjectivities, global labor, (urban) asylum politics, fortress Europe, securitization, south-south mobilities, human trafficking, refugee and migrant health and well-being, etc.
4 | Nature, Society and Environmental Change
Topics of interest include, but are not limited to, the following: commodification of nature; urban metabolisms; environmental and climate justice; governing nature/society relations; feminist, racialized and queer positionalities within urban political ecology; mining and extraction; energy and water transitions; provincializing and urbanizing political ecology; climate debt environmental racism and disposable life; food justice and urban agriculture; perspectives on the anthropocene; ecocide, etc.
5 | Mapping Bodies, Corporeality and Violence
Topics of interest include, but are not limited to, the following: corporeality in crisis and contestation; bodily intersections/assemblages of race, gender and sexuality; primitive accumulation and the body; materializing theorizations of the body in space and time; production and reproduction of corporeality; body as target – war and urban contest; blackness, body and the afterlives of slavery; racialized re-segregations, containments and displacements; decolonizing the body; structural violence, marked bodies and everyday life; queer assemblages and the national body; carceral geographies, etc.
6 | Critical “Development” Geographies: perspectives from the Global South
Topics of interest include, but are not limited to, the following: critical and southern perspectives on development; decolonizing development; aid, donors and development interventions; the privatization and financialization of development aid; geographies of uneven development; postcolonial theory and development; development ethnographies; development, security, and bordering; geopolitics and biopolitics of development; technopolitics; gender and development, governmentality and development; etc.
7 | Geography and matter / materiality
Topics of interest include, but are not limited to, the following: materialist approaches to materiality; the materiality of inequality and dispossession; materiality in urban studies; materiality and power; vital materialisms; more than human geographies; the politics of urban assemblages; assemblage theory and methods; assemblage theory for strategic political action; socio-technical and socio-natural geographies; urban metabolisms; materializing political ecology, technopolitics and expert knowledge; emancipatory materialities; etc.
8 | Remaking Space through Ideology, Culture, and Arts
Topics of interest include, but are not limited to, the following: reclaiming space; identities and lifestyles; diasporic and migrant artistic engagement; high-art and architectural commodification of space; ideological narratives, othering and spatial enclosures; art, the ‘creative class’ and urban commodification; monuments, geography and nationalism; feminism and histories of urban art; geography, ideology and transgression; art and practices of resistance; art, ideology and everyday space; landscapes, memory, monuments, and commemoration; psychogeography and radical cartographies; exploring urban spaces through artistic
practices, etc.
9 | Knowledge Production, Education and Epistemic Agendas
Topics of interest include, but are not limited to, the following: corporatization of knowledge and exclusion in academia; the politics of open source; democratization and knowledge-production; southern theory; anarchists and dissident education; beyond eurocentric knowledge; radical pedagogies; resistance and education; the role of indigenous knowledge in the academy; participatory action research in teaching, learning and research; practicing solidarities, education and social change; education and justice; challenges of multi-disciplinarity and trans-disciplinarity; co-production of knowledge; value orientations and epistemic agendas; political conditions and consequences of the production and use of knowledge, etc.
ABOUT THE CONFERENCE
Field Trips: This edition capitalizes on the context by putting emphasis on fieldtrips that will build upon and further expand the conference themes through an engagement with local articulations and actors. Excursions correspond to a third of the total program duration, whereby a repertoire of 6 routes and destinations will be available for participants to choose from in accordance to preferences. Details in this regard will be released in spring 2015.
Limited Places: Kindly note that due to logistical considerations participation space will be limited to 250 persons.
This conference complies with the Palestinian Call for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel
More information about the conference in our website www.iccg2015.org
We look forward to seeing you in Palestine!
• Local Government and Urban Governance CFP
09 Dicembre 2014
CALL FOR PAPERS
INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE
“Local Government and Urban Governance: Citizen Responsive Innovations in Europe and in Africa”
International Geographical Union – Commission on Geography of Governance & Institute of Geography and Spatial Planning, University of Lisbon, Portugal
Lisbon, Portugal,
April, 9-10 2015
Three main themes:
Theme 1 – Local Government and Urban Governance in Europe: the impact of austerity, recent reforms and the role of local government in an ‘EU Urban Agenda’
Theme 2 – Local Government and Urban Governance in Africa: democratic decentralization, good governance and the role of local government in the ‘Post-2015 Agenda’
Theme 3 – The use of ICT to expand the role of citizens in Urban Governance: national cases and international comparisons
Conference Website: https://sites.google.com/site/locgovgeo2015/home
University of Lisbon
• Remote Control: Violence/Containment/Technology conference programme
09 Dicembre 2014
Conference ‘REMOTE CONTROL: Violence/Containment/Technology’
Utrecht University: 12-13 December 2014
Surveillance technology has become a central means of governance, political domination and social ordering. A central characteristic of contemporary surveillance technologies is their reliance on digitally mediated and technologically controlled remoteness. Remoteness in all its modalities (e.g. as distancing or outsourcing), has become a characteristic feature of our machine-defined social life. Therefore, the Centre for the Humanities and the Centre for Conflict Studies are organising the conference ‘REMOTE CONTROL: Violence/Containment/Technology’ on 12 and 13 December. The aim of this event is to think through the analytical, political, ethical and epistemological consequences of technologies of remote control, warfare and policing.
For information & programme, see:
http://news.hum.uu.nl/events/conference-remote-control-violencecontainmenttechnology-2/
Contributors include:
•Prof. Stephen Graham (Professor of Cities and Society, Newcastle University)
•Prof. Em. Mark Duffield (University of Bristol, former Director of the Global Insecurities Centre)
•Dr Rivke Jaffe (Centre for Urban Studies, University of Amsterdam)
•Prof. Marieke de Goede (Professor of Politics, University of Amsterdam)
•Prof. Beatrice de Graaf (Professor of History of International Relations, Utrecht University)
•Prof. Georg Frerks MSc (Professor of Conflict Prevention and Conflict Management, Utrecht University)
•Jonas Staal (artist)
•Dr Patrick Crogan (Senior Lecturer at Department of Creative Industries, University of the West of England)
• Borders in Transition conference programme
09 Dicembre 2014
The programme of the conference “Borders in Transition: Rethinking Sovereignty, Domestic Politics and International Relations in the MENA region”, to be held at the European University Institute, Florence on December 11-12, 2014 has been published and can be viewed here http://www.eui.eu/Events/download.jsp?FILE_ID=7270
The conference sets out to explore the impact of the transition process in North Africa and the Middle East (MENA) on the nature and management of borders. Focusing on Libya, Egypt/Sinai, and Syria/Iraq, the conference addresses the following questions: Firstly, what are the implications of the altered nature of borders in the region for the notion of state sovereignty? Secondly, how did altered patterns of border management affect the role of specific local and societal actors? Thirdly, the conference will reflect on the regional and international dimension of these developments, including the implications for the EU–the ‘borderlands’ of the MENA region.
