CALL FOR PAPERS
Royal Geographical Society (with IBG) 2008 Annual Conference, London, August
27-29
Where Species Meet and Mingle: Remaking and Tracing Biogeographies
Gail Davies (UCL) and Jamie Lorimer (OUCE)
This session explores the geographical dimensions to the production and
understanding of our multispecies world. Space is critically intertwined
with the emergence and definition of species. Spatial parameters of
proximity and distance influence species evolution; geographical
relationships with the environment shape plant and animal distributions;
whilst certain spaces, such as museums, zoos, field centres and laboratories
have been central to understanding the relations between species and the
spatial. Yet, as a variety of agricultural, biotechnological, cultural,
economic and political process reconfigure environments, organisms and the
spaces that link them, these biogeographies and the techniques through which
they are produced and understood are shifting. On the one hand, new
connections are accompanied by a loss of diversity, to be countered through
spatial technologies of bio-security and conservation. Yet at the same
time, the production and opening up of new spaces is revealing and producing
new organisms, new understandings and new forms of life, whether in the
wild, field, city, home or laboratory. Bringing these two strands together
we seek to explore the ways the intersection of human beings, animals and
other organisms, landscapes, and technologies might be producing distinctly
new biogeographies. We hope to reflect on what these processes mean for our
understandings of the bio, biodiversity and biogeography; our concepts of
species and species integrity, including our own (post-human) species being;
the different temporalities embedded within different spaces/topologies and
the spatial processes involved in remaking and tracing biogeographies.
We welcome a broad range of responses to this theme, from human and physical
geographers and cognate disciplines, and from those whose interest is both
empirical and/or theoretical. Papers might include, but are not limited to,
the following arenas and themes.
Arenas:
Conservation biodiversity, rewilding, restoration/recombination,
adaptation to climate change, invasives
Animal geographies welfare, transgenics, urban natures
Animal behaviour field and laboratory ethology
Environmental history, palaeontology, evolutionary biology
Environmental philosophy, biophilosophy, posthumanism/more-than-human
geographies
Climate change, the anthropocene and future natures
Themes:
The political economy of multispecies mixings and the unequal
production/erasure of difference
Cosmopolitics of difference and differentiation
Inter- and intra-disciplinary biogeographies and methodologies
Ethics and animal welfare
Taxonomy and the classification and ordering of blurred species identities
The status of chimeras and hybrids
Viral and microbial ecologies
Risk, doom, hope and hyperbole
We welcome early enquiries and expressions of interest to either Gail Davies
([log in to unmask]) or Jamie Lorimer ([log in to unmask]). We
are looking to assemble the list of contributors, titles and abstracts by
14th January 2007. The final deadline for the submission of paper and
sessions abstracts to the RGS-IBG is 22 February 2008.
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