2nd Call for Papers:
SPATIALITIES AND PRACTICES OF GOVERNANCE
Annual Meeting of the Association of American Geographers
Seattle, April 12-16 2011
Paper session co-organized by: Katherine Phillips and Martin D. Jones
(Aberystwyth)
Sponsored by: Political Geography Specialty Group
We invite submissions for an AAG session on spatialities and practices of
governance, and especially welcome empirically-informed contributions from
any area of geography.
The concept of ‘governance’ has received considerable academic interest
over the last two decades eliciting responses ranging from optimism for a
more democratic mode of governing; confusion due to difficulties
associated with ‘collaborative’ or ‘participative’ processes of
decision-making; to suspicion that governance may represent a means of
social control through a new form of governmentality (Swyngedouw, 2005).
Efforts to reconcile governance in theory and practice have introduced the
idea of ‘good governance’ and the notion of ‘meta-governance’. These
concerns fall squarely into geographical debates about spatial categories
such as scale, network, territory and place, and their utility value in
understanding power, agency, subjectivity and social interactions,
inviting simultaneous consideration of multiple spatialities of practice
(Jessop et al, 2008).
As new governance arrangements emerge, evolve, and sometimes fail,
research in multiple, often disparate fields of geography such as health,
environment, and education, development and policy studies have grappled
with multiple tensions associated with governance activity. This session
aims to bring together insights from these diverse areas and to draw upon
the empirical observations of researchers to contribute to theoretical
understandings of governance processes.
Suggested topics might include, but are not limited to:-
* Locating power in participative and collaborative governance
* Successes and failures of metagovernance
* Governance as a form of governmentality
* Governance as a gift? Development, sustainability and ‘ownership’
* Positionality within hierarchical and networked institutions, practices
and approaches
* The significance of identity (territorial, organizational, or any other
kind) in governance
* Spatial interactions, distance and proximity and impacts on governance
* The impact of flux and change on governance processes
Please send abstracts of 250 words or less to Katherine Phillips
([log in to unmask]) or Martin Jones ([log in to unmask]) by October 15, 2010.
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Martin D. Jones MA.
PhD Candidate in Human Geography
Room G1 - 01970 622610
Institute of Geography and Earth Sciences
Aberystwyth University / Prifysgol Aberystwyth
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