IAG2023: CFP IAG2023 PERTH – 8 sessions sponsored by the Cultural Geography Study Group

Hello all, 

This year the Cultural Geography Study Group is sponsoring 8 sessions at the IAG 2023 conference. Please find details below, and do get in touch with the session organisers if you have questions. Remember, the CFP closes 31 March 2023. Please submit via the Conference website and send a copy to the session organisers.  

For further information, see the website: https://iag23perth.com.au/index.php 

We will also be running a pre-conference Study Group event, which will continue throughout the conference week and cumulate in a roundtable event. Details to come very soon!  

Best wishes, 
Kaya, Melina, and Michelle 
Cultural Geography SG Convenors 

1.  

New and Emerging Research in Cultural Geography
Organised by IAG Cultural Geography Study Group Convenors: Kaya Barry, Melina Ey, Michelle Duffy 

This session showcases cutting-edge research in Cultural Geography. We aim to provide a forum for researchers at all levels – postgraduates, early career, and research leaders, to engage with the conference theme ‘Coexistence, Collaboration and Geography’. Cultural geography comprises a wide-ranging group of geographical sub-disciplines that engages with the arts, humanities, natural and social sciences. Cultural domains of geographical research continue to grow in breadth and depth, with expanding theoretical formulations, methodological approaches and fields of interest. We know this year’s conference theme will resonate with many of the creative, collaborative, and emergent research interests of cultural geographers – it is an excellent opportunity to highlight the disciplinary contributions of cultural geography.  

We welcome your papers that expand the horizon of Cultural Geography! Standard papers and/or creative or alternative formats are warmly welcomed! 

Please send abstracts by 31 March to Kaya Barry (k.barry@griffith.edu.au ) and Melina Ey (melina.ey@newcastle.edu.au), and Michelle Duffy (Michelle.Duffy@newcastle.edu.au) – and please upload a copy to the conference website.

2.  

Re-thinking collaboration in a ‘more-than-human’ world 

Organised by: Tom Roberts, UNSW Canberra (thomas.roberts@adfa.edu.au) and Andrew Lapworth, UNSW Canberra (a.lapworth@adfa.edu.au)  

In a world where the constitutive entanglements between human and nonhuman are proliferating at what seems like an ever-increasing rate (Braun and Whatmore, 2010; Williams and Keating, 2022), the question of what collaboration might look like in a ‘more-than-human’ world has taken on a new sense of urgency. According to its traditional usage, to collaborate means “to work in conjunction with another or others, to co-operate” (Oxford English Dictionary, 2022). But what happens to our understanding of collaboration when the others that we wish to co-operate with are no longer human? How do we evaluate the success or failure of these more-than-human collaborations, when the impacts of these ventures concern nonhuman, and even nonliving beings? And what new modalities of perception, knowledge, and thought are required of us when experimenting with collaboration beyond the human? 

In this session, we invite participants to reflect upon the problems, processes and promises associated with re-thinking collaboration in a ‘more-than-human’ world. Potential topics for consideration include but are not limited to: 

3. 

The politics of “community infrastructures” 

Co-sponsored by the Political Geography and Cultural Geography Study Groups 

Organised by: Ellen van Holstein and Philippa Chandler 

Geographers have long highlighted how peoples’ social lives and circumstances are supported and enriched by various forms of infrastructure, including places, technologies, objects, practices and routines. However, closer attention is needed to the ways in which infrastructures shape access to resources, and thereby generate unequal opportunities. This session focuses on the politics of ‘community infrastructures’, those entities and systems that support people to convene, to build relationships and to organise.   

We are seeking papers that contribute to the conceptual and empirical understanding of the relevance and importance of community infrastructure. We are interested in papers that focus on the following topics and questions:  

-  What counts as community infrastructure? 

-  What are the political processes by which community infrastructures are provided?  

- How does community infrastructure generate spatially equal or unequal access to opportunities and resources?   

-  Who does (and who should do) the work of creating and maintaining community infrastructure?   

-  How does community infrastructure facilitate feelings of belonging, or not-belonging? 

-  How does community infrastructure shape grassroots organising?  

Insights are sought from scholars working on these types of empirical contexts:  

- Community places such as community centres 

- Facilities, services and institutions (i.e. libraries, schools, churches) 

- Online networks (i.e. neighbourhood Facebook pages, Whatsapp groups, Meet Up) 

- Leisure and sports clubs  

- Charity organisations and volunteering  

- Workplaces and unions  

- Informal groups or gathering sites 

- Crisis response  

Please send abstract proposals to ellen.van.holstein@rmit.edu.au and p.chandler@unimelb.edu.au     

4. 

Worlds of work 

Organised by: David Bissell, University of Melbourne, Andrew Gorman-Murray, Western Sydney University, Elizabeth Straughan, University of Melbourne 

Many kinds of work-related geographical transformations are currently taking place. In the long comet tail of Covid-19, the intensification of working from home and other kinds of remote work are changing commuting patterns and the kinds of social, cultural, and economic activities currently going on in neighbourhoods and CBDs. Technological transformations related to the intensification of digital automation, AI and robotics are changing the place of work, altering where work happens, and the kinds of skills required for this work. The intensified platformisation of work is giving rise to new kinds of precarity and insecurity for some. Broader processes of deindustrialisation are creating new dilemmas for industries and communities alike, creating new power geometries in the process. 

This session asks: what are these transformations doing to the worlds that we inhabit? How are these transformations changing subjectivities, relationships, households, and communities in different ways? How are they changing capacities, skills, dispositions and habits? In this session, we’re keen to showcase papers that explore the worlds that open up and are closed down by different kinds of paid and unpaid work.  

We invite contributions from all areas of human geography, including cultural geography, social geography, urban geography, economic geography, and labour geography that address changing worlds of work from different conceptual and empirical perspectives. We’re keen to explore the ontological questions associated with the kinds of changes that are occurring, as well as epistemological questions about how we come to sense and know such transformations. 

5. 

Think-practice geographies 

Organised by: Tara Elisabeth Jeyasingh (UNSW Canberra), George Burdon (UNSW Canberra), Nina Williams (UNSW Canberra), JD Dewsbury (UNSW Canberra). 

Recent work in human geography unsettles the boundaries between thinking and practising. On the one hand, the expansion of interest in creative practices such as visual arts, music, fashion, theatre and literature has given rise to a new kind of thinking in practice, one that has provoked new questions, provided generative encounters with difference and effectively redefined ‘the field’ of geographic research (Hawkins, 2015; Boyd & Straughan, 2022; Barry, Duffy & Lobo, 2021; Patchett, 2016; Zhang, 2020). On the other hand, recent interventions in debates surrounding theories, ontologies and epistemic habits of geographic thought have also pointed out the practical aspects of geographic thinking more broadly (Ruddick, 2017; Roberts & Dewsbury, 2022; Joronen & Hakli, 2017; Bissell, 2021; Kinkaid, 2021; McKittrick, 2021), whether that be in the force of an idea or concept to change how you think, the capacity of a new theoretical paradigm to challenge or occlude geographic assumptions, or even the moments of resonance and tension that arise in discussing ideas with colleagues. Here the very doing of geography itself becomes a kind of practice in thinking.  

Refusing any clear separation of thought and practice, this session therefore explores what it means to think-practice geography today. We invite contributions which engage with both practice as a creative activity which thinks, and with thinking as a practice or activity. More than just bringing these two sides into dialogue, the session seeks to highlight the necessary coexistence of both these conceptualisations of a think-practice geography which aspires to enact the dissolution of their divide. Contributions may be interested in, but not limited to, the following and their intersections: 

Thinking in practice: 

Practice in thinking: 

Please send abstracts and expressions of interest to Tara Elisabeth Jeyasingh (t.jeyasingh@student.unsw.edu.au), George Burdon (g.burdon@adfa.edu.au) and Nina Williams (nina.williams@adfa.edu.au).  

REFERENCES 

Barry, K., Duffy, M. & Lobo, M. (2021). Speculative listening: melting sea ice and new methods of listening with the planet. Global Discourse, 11(1-2), pp. 115-129.  

Bissell, D. (2021). A changing sense of place: Geography and COVID-19. Geographical Research, 59(2), pp. 150-159. 

Boyd, C. & Straughan, E. (2022). Posthuman landscapes. cultural geographies, OnlineFirst.  

Hawkins, H. (2015). For Creative Geographies: Geography, Visual Arts and the Making of Worlds. New York: Routledge. 

Joronen, M. & Hakli, J. (2017). Politicizing ontology. Progress in Human Geography, 41(5), pp. 561-699. 

Kinkaid, E. (2021). Is post-phenomenology a critical geography? Subjectivity and difference in post-phenomenological geographies. Progress in Human Geography, 45(2), pp. 298-316. 

McKittrick, K. (2021) Dear Science and Other Stories. Durham: Duke University Press. 

Patchett, M. (2016). The taxidermist’s apprentice: stitching together the past and present of a craft practice. cultural geographies, 23(3), pp. 401-419. 

Roberts, T. & Dewsbury, J.D. (2022). Vital aspirations for geography in an era of negativity: Valuing life differently with Deleuze. Progress in Human Geography, 45(6), pp. 1339-1740.  

Ruddick, S. (2017) Rethinking the Subject, Reimagining Worlds. Dialogues in Human Geography 7(2), pp. 119-139. 

Zhang, V. (2020). NOISY FIELD EXPOSURES, or what comes before attunement. cultural geographies, 27(4), pp. 647-664. 

6. 

Geographies of (in)security 

Session organisers: Ari Jerrems (ari.jerrems@anu.edu.au) and Kaya Barry (k.barry@griffith.edu.au)  

Co-sponsored by the Cultural Geography Study Group & Political Geography Study Group  

Notions of insecurity are pervasive in public discourse. The perceived and real sources of this insecurity are numerous and varied, as are the scales at which measures taken to achieve security are understood to be necessary. In recent decades, geographers have increasingly studied the politics of (in)security and processes of securitization. There has been specific attention given to different registers of insecurity such as risk (Amoore 2013), the unknown (Aradau and Van Munster 2011), crisis (Vradis et al. 2020), emergency (Adey et al. 2015), disaster (Bonilla 2020), slow violence (Pain and Cahill 2021), visualities of uncertainty (Barry 2020), and more. Insecurity may be conceived and enacted at diverse sites from the body (Mountz 2017), the everyday (Smith and Pain 2008) to the planetary (Burke et al 2016). They have explored affective atmospheres of insecurity (Fregonese 2017), the spatially uneven impact of specific issues as well as the measures taken to govern them. This session brings together papers that explore contemporary geographies of (in)security in a changing landscape of emerging challenges and possibilities. We invite papers that explore diverse dimensions of (in)security, including but not limited to:  

Please send abstracts to Ari (ari.jerrems@anu.edu.au) and Kaya (k.barry@griffith.edu.au) by 31 March. 

References:  

Adey, Peter, Anderson, Ben and Graham, Stephen (2015), ‘Introduction: Governing Emergencies: Beyond Exceptionality’, Theory, Culture & Society 32(2): 3-17.  

Amoore, Louise (2013), The Politics of Possibility: Risk and Security Beyond Probability, Duke University Press.  

Aradau, Claudia and Van Munster, Rens (2011), Politics of Catastrophe: Genealogies of the Unknown’, Routledge.  

Barry, Kaya (2020), Diagramming the uncertainties of COVID-19: Scales, spatialities and aesthetics’, Dialogues in Human Geography 10(2): 282-286.  

Bonilla, Yarimar (2020), ‘The coloniality of disaster: Race, empire and the temporal logics of emergency in Puerto Rico, USA’, Political Geography 78: 102181.  

Burke, Anthony, Fishel, Stefanie, Mitchell, Audra, Dalby, Simon and Levine, Daniel (2016), ‘Planet Politics: A Manifesto from the End of IR’, Millennium: Journal of International Studies 44(3): 499-523.  

Fregonese, Sara (2017), ‘Affective atmospheres, urban geopolitics and conflict (de)escalation in Beirut’, Political Geography 61: 1-10.  

Mountz, Alison (2017), ‘Political geography III: Bodies’, Progress in Human Geography 42(5): 759-769.  

Pain, Rachel and Cahill, Caitlin (2021), ‘Critical political geographies of slow violence and resistance’, Environment and Planning C: Politics and Space. Online first DOI: 10.1177/23996544211052051  

Smith, Susan and Pain, Rachel (2008), Fear: Critical Geopolitics and Everyday Life, Routledge  

Vradis, Antonis, Papada, Evie, Papoutsi, Anna and Painter, Joe (2020), ‘Governing mobility in times of crisis: Practicing the border and embodying resistance in and beyond the hotspot infrastructure’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 38(6): 981-990.  

7. 

Mobile Bodies in Urban Spaces  

Organised by: Tom Fisher, University of Wollongong, taf886@uowmail.edu.au

Mobilities research takes an embodied cross-disciplinary approach to human and non-human movements across space and time - a significant departure from the traditional disembodied approaches of destination-focussed transport geography. Research around urban spaces, and how mobilities are produced with/in urban areas, has been largely left out of these transport-oriented discussions. A key example is the constant interactions and negotiations between different mobile bodies sharing urban road spaces and how these unfold across diverse geographical places. Cycling, running, dog parks, and community push for safer urban spaces are other examples of how research in mobilities in urban spaces can offer new perspectives that go beyond the user/transport - human/built-environment focus.  

The session is open to various types of presentation formats from all levels of scholars. This includes in-person and presentations from afar. These may be traditional conference papers, roundtable discussion and/or more artistic. They can be works in progress and can be theoretical and/or empirical in nature. All levels of research development are welcome – from the experimental to the publishable.  

For this Conference, relevant session concepts/themes/topics include:  

- Human and non-human/more than human worlds with particular attention to mobility justice  

8. 

‘Unwieldy Underworlds’: work-in-progress in/on the uncontained and uncontainable ocean 

Session Organisers: Charity Edwards (Monash charity.edwards@monash.edu), Amelia Hine (UoW ahine@uow.edu.au) & Rebecca Olive (RMIT rebecca.olive@rmit.edu.au) 

Recent scholars such as Steinberg, Peters, Niemanis, Helmreich, Probyn, and Todd have challenged landed bias by approaching our world(s) through ‘wet ontologies’: questioning assumptions of existence, being and reality, and a broader dependance on fixed points and knowable truths. As Peters and Steinberg (2015) have asked, how can the sea’s three-dimensional, wet, volatile form — with its ongoing processes of repetition and differentiation, dissolution and recomposition, stasis and dynamism — help us rethink some of the key questions that are driving critical social and political sciences? These questions remain critical, especially given recent UN treaty negotiations that commit to protecting undersea worlds but still rationalise the ocean through rigid managerialist frameworks.  

This session proposes a counterargument of unintelligibility, which simultaneously contests conceptualisations of the ocean as a world apart from humans while resisting terrestrial systems of governance overlaid onto oceanspace. We encourage the generative capacity of oceanic thinking and ask for unfinished papers on undersea matters and materials. We call for problems and problematising — unmanaged and unmanageable work-in-progress — and offer to confer with a sequence of pre-panel coffee chat, pecha kucha presentations, guest collaborators PLUS post-panel debrief. This is an experimental reworking of the conference format to allow connections across speakers, concepts, and projects. We see this as support for unwieldy thoughts on, and precarious projects in, impossible environments. We invite 250-word propositions regarding the uncontained and uncontainable ocean, and particularly welcome speculations on: