CALL FOR PAPERS:
ECONOMIC AND DEVELOPMENT GEOGRAPHIES
IBG CONFERENCE 2003
Dear All
Apologies for cross-posting
This is a call for papers for the following session, jointly organised
by DARG and EGRG, to be held at the 2003 RGS-IBG Conference (3 – 5
September) in London. Abstracts needed by 10 March 2003.
UNDERSTANDING GLOBALISATION? ECONOMIC AND DEVELOPMENT GEOGRAPHIES
convenors Roger Lee and Cathy McIlwaine
RGS-IBG Annual Conference
Wednesday 3 – Friday 5 September 2003
RGS-IBG 1 Kensington Gore London SW7 2AR
This session is concerned with the problems and possibilities arising
from discursive conversations between geographies of economies and
geographies of development. Why don’t development geographers and
economic geographers talk to each other, how might they, and what would
be the point of such conversations?
Concerns for distant others – whether, for example, in the
parochially-centred form of imperialism (neo-or otherwise), the
promulgation of social justice, an ethic of care, or an engagement with
difference (even if only latterly differences of the self) – have been
central to various formulations of human geography over the past century
or so. The underlying (and often unthought) geography assumed in much of
this work is of a core (relatively unproblematic in terms of
development) and a periphery (relatively problematic in these terms).
The self-centrism and absolutism of this position has been revealed both
through the deconstruction of what might be meant by ‘development’ and
through the diverse border-crossing flows associated with cycles of
globalisation – which have made a mess of neat geographies of self and
other. The relationality inherent (if often unrecognised in
essentialised notions of place and difference) in the geographical
imagination is now forced onto the agenda of economic, political and
social thought if not - as is all too apparent in hegemonic responses to
September 11 2001 - of geo-political practice and understanding.
Such deficiencies reflect, in part at least, a failure to problematise
the relations between apparently globally hegemonic economic geographies
and local understandings of, and desires for, the nature and objectives
of development. But in the context of a fluid, multi-scalar, relational
world, any rapprochement of the continuing mutual isolation of economic
and development geographies is problematic. For one thing, such a
meeting involves more than a (re)focus, in the ‘core’, on the lives,
living places and work of non-local ‘peripheral’ or ‘semi-peripheral’
others. In a globalising, relational world, such ‘others’ are
‘our’selves. And these selves – people, places, practices - are
constantly and creatively (if sometimes violently) othered. Networked
geographies of contradictory capitalist evaluation and practice and of
resistance and opposition transcend and, at the same time, produce place
and new forms of place. Whilst often frightening and beyond
non-relational comprehension, these contradictions and oppositional
formations may also be full of potential. They point up the possibility
- even the necessity - of othering, of alternatives, of a diversity of
economic geographies. Thus a rapprochement also involves a
reconceptualisation of economies and a recognition of the possibilities
of economic diversification. Or at least it involves a recognition of
the formative (if often violent) relations both between competing
capitalisms and between them and non-capitalist processes of
exploitation in the production and circulation of values. Such processes
are essential to all economies and hence to development, however
defined. Furthermore, and relatedly, geographies of uneven development
have, in such a geographically fluid, disrupted and relational world,
themselves to be reformulated. An exclusive focus on the consequences of
global capitalism, whilst in some ways ever more essential in the
contemporary world, also serves to reduce development to a placeless,
passive and helpless process, shaped solely by dominant external
relations. Conversely, a recognition of the relational construction of
places decentres western hegemony. Everywhere, all selves and all
others, become marginalised.
All of these transformations (and more) are in process. They demand new
geographies of development and of economies to escape from the confines
not merely of the intellectual nonsense of singular economies but of the
equally nonsensical, singular, essentialised and rigid geographies of
those economies which have long since been superseded.
In exploring these ideas, the session aims to include both theoretical
and empirical papers.
If you would like to participate, please email either
Roger Lee ([log in to unmask]) or
Cathy McIlwaine([log in to unmask])
Department of Geography, Queen Mary, University of London, London E1 4NS
020 7882 5400
The final date for receipt, by us, of abstracts for the session is 10
March 2003
--
roger lee
professor of geography and head of department
queen mary, university of london
london e1 4ns
uk
[log in to unmask]
telephone +44 (0)20 7882 5410
fax +44 (0)20 8981 6276
web address http://www.geog.qmul.ac.uk/
this site contains details of our undergraduate, MSc and MPhil/PhD
programmes of study
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