Hester Parr asked me to post this. Please do not reply to me!
Jo
Call for Papers
AAG Denver 2005 5th-9th April
Beyond the fractured self: rethinking rootedness and stability
Are selves always fluid, mobile and fractured?
What does it mean to be rooted?
How are ideas about fractured and bounded selves dualistically
constituted?
How does fluidity happen?
How is rootedness practised?
What does it feel like to be stable?
How can we rethink identities?
Critiques of dualistic ways of understanding are now commonplace in
geography and related disciplines. Yet the binary between (politically
suspect) notions of coherent, bounded and grounded subjectivities and
collective identities and (politically progressive) ideas of fractured,
fluid, mobile and relational selves persists. It persists because of the
political significance of the deconstructive move and because of the
difficulties of theorising alternative subjectivities and identities
that do not reinstate old essentialisms. Yet, as recent critics have
argued, valorising fractured and destabilized identities overlooks the
critical potential of discourses of locatedness, roots, fixities and
boundaries (Gibson-Graham 2003). In addition, the ways in which
stability and locatedness happen and are experienced are often ignored
(Kirby, 1996), thus neglecting opportunities to rethink how people
explore senses of self and belonging through combinations of both
dynamic and constant discourses and properties.
The papers in this session attend to the meanings and implications of
practices through which people seek and find forms of stability and
rootedness in relation to their own sense of self, sense of location and
social relationships. They pay attention to the significance of these
practices for those involved and for the ways in which stability and
rootedness may be theorized beyond the dichotomies of fluidity and
boundedness, fracture and fixity.
Abstracts by Monday 11th October to Catherine Nash ([log in to unmask])
or Hester Parr ([log in to unmask]).
Dr Hester Parr
Department of Geography
University of Dundee
Dundee
DD1 4HN
01382 344434
http://www.dundee.ac.uk/geography/inclusion/
[I am presently on research leave, but can remotely access email].
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