Call for Papers. Association of American Geographers (AAG) Annual
Conference April 17-21, 2007, San Francisco
TITLE: Place and voluntary activism
Convenors:
Christine Milligan Lancaster University, UK and Robin Kearns University of
Auckland, New Zealand
Discussant: Jennifer Wolch
Context
In 2003, Salomon et al maintained that the global rise of voluntarism
could be equated to an associational revolution that ‘could prove to be as
significant a development of the late twentieth and early twenty-first
centuries as the rise of the nation-state was at the end of the late
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries’ (p.2). Critics claim this is
something of an overstatement, but at its root lies a growing
dissatisfaction with the effectiveness of state and market responses to
the increasing social and welfare crises within and across nation-states
and a turn to alternative ‘third’ way strategies to address these issues.
One consequence of this shift has been the emergence of new spaces of
governance that operate in hybrid forms between the state and civil
society. Yet voluntary activists have traditionally assumed the existence
of a sharp distinction between the state and civil society. This raises
questions about the extent to which they recognise, adapt to, or engage
with these new hybrid political spaces where the state, market and civil
society are creating new instrumentalities for the implementation of
spatially-defined welfare policies.
The aim of this session, then, is to open up debate about the extent to
which the shift to third way approaches may being opening up real
opportunities for contest and inclusion, or whether their disaggregation
from wider social and political constructs result in highly constrained
partnerships with very limited potential for activism.
Abstracts are invited for papers that address one or more of the following
themes:
• Activism, health and welfare
• Theorisation of activism
• Activism and globalisation
• Place, politics and activism
• Inter- and intra-national comparisons
• Activism, development and change
• Contest / inclusion
• Problematising ‘voluntarism’and’activism’
Expressions of interest should be sent in the form of an abstract
acceptable to the AAG (see
http://www.aag.org/annualmeetings/SF2007/call4papers.cfm) to Christine
Milligan ([log in to unmask]) and Robin Kearns
([log in to unmask]) by 6th October 2006.
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