CALL FOR ABSTRACTS
ASSOCIATION OF AMERICAN GEOGRAPHERS (AAG) CONFERENCE
NEW YORK, 2001 (27th FEB-MARCH 3rd 2001)
INTOXICATING SPACES
Organisers
1. James Kneale (University College London)
2. Alan Latham (University of Southampton)
3. Derek McCormack (University of Bristol)
This session aims to provide a long overdue forum
within which to engage with the diverse ways that the
spatialities of everyday life are produced under the
influence of intoxicating, psychoactive or
mood-altering substances - coffee, beer, wine, St.
John's Wort, glue, tea, Prozac, cannabis, etc. It
seeks to open a field of questioning that might be
pursued along the following lines. How are such
substances implicated in the complex relations of
bodies, technologies and practices through which human
geographies take shape? How are they figured through
tactics and strategies of governance, regulation, and
control, at the same time as they problematise the
purity, stability, coherence and legibility of lived,
embodied space? And, in spilling over the boundary
between the categories of sobriety and intoxication,
what does the problematic place of such substances say
about the purity of the category of the 'human' in
'human geographies?'
Such questions are beginning to receive attention
across a wide range of disciplines, and this session
aims to critically and creatively contribute to a
serious engagement with the problematic of
intoxication. Potential contributors might like to
think about addressing this problematic through the
following themes:
- The level at which intoxicants, psychoactive
substances, etc. work, and the extent to which they
problematise referential categories such as nature,
culture, subject, object, active, passive etc.
- The implication of intoxicating substances in the
performance of particular practices, the forms of
embodied conduct and responsibility they
(de)legitimate, and how these processes are figured
through categories such as race, gender, age,
nationality etc.
- How intoxicating spaces offer possibilities of
rethinking the extent to which the spaces of everyday
life are produced as much through the affective
viscerality of corporeal ways of knowing and moving as
they are through cognitive and representational
knowledge.
- The changing shape of efforts to delimit and define
the space(s) of intoxication through the mobilisation
of technologies and practices of control, regulation
and governance.
- The role of different forms of authority in
(de)stabilising the boundaries between legal and
illegal intoxicating substances and practices through
the operation of particular 'theatres of proof'
(Latour, 1988).
- The consequences that paying attention to the
thresholds and boundaries between sobriety and
intoxication has for the (im)possibility of writing,
speaking, or moving in ways that take seriously the
instability and impurity of intoxicating spaces and
practices.
- The ethics of responsiveness and responsibility that
emerges from and informs interventions into spaces of
intoxication.
We welcome contributions that address these and other
related issues through a range of theoretical and
empirical approaches.
Please send abstracts (250 words max.) or expressions
of interest by Thursday 10 August to
Derek McCormack
School of Geographical Sciences
University of Bristol
University Road
Bristol BS8 1SS
England
email: [log in to unmask]
fax: +44 (0)117 928 7878
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