Call for Papers:
Association of American Geographers (AAG) Annual Conference, April 14-18, 2010, Washington D.C.
Geographies of difference and co-existence
Session organised by: Gill Valentine and Louise Waite (University of Leeds)
Sponsored by the Sexuality and Space Specialty Group of the AAG
Within the public sphere there has been growing recognition of the parallel experiences of discrimination encountered by minority ethnic communities, lesbians and gay men, children/older people, women, disabled people and people of religion/belief, and the need therefore to equalise the rights of, and protections for, each equality group. There is an implicit assumption embedded in some of these debates that these equality groups share common agendas and that their interests coincide because of these common experiences of exclusion. Yet, high profile examples of competing rights claims between different equality strands suggest that this is not necessarily the case. Sexual orientation and religion/belief are equality strands that are most commonly assumed to experience these tensions. For example, in 2008 a Registrar of Births, Deaths and Marriages in London, UK refused to conduct civil partnership services for lesbians and gay men on the grounds that it contravened her orthodox Christian beliefs. Such tensions are equally likely to arise in relation to other strands too. Genetic screening and abortion are issues that frequently set the women’s rights and disability rights movements against each other. Likewise, age and disability strands may experience tensions around representation - the disability strand want older people to align with its rights campaigns because so many older people have disabilities but older people do not tend to identify as disabled or with the disability movement, rather the age strand is keen to represent older people as active rather than in terms of impairment or ill-health. These issues are of relevance to geographers given contemporary debates within the discipline about the significance of everyday encounters in public space in enabling people to live with difference. Moreover, such competing rights claims are likely to manifest themselves differently in different places because of variations in socio-legal frameworks, opportunities for everyday encounters, and public attitudes to difference.
We therefore invite papers from scholars from a wide range of international contexts that explore examples of these tensions/conflicts between any combination of the equality strands (age, religion and belief, gender, sexual orientation, race, disability) and that highlight ways for reconciling such competing values and promoting co-existence.
Please send abstracts of no more than 250 words to BOTH convenors by 14 October 2009.
Convenors:
Professor Gill Valentine, [log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]>
Dr Louise Waite, [log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]>
Details of the 2010 AAG Annual Conference are available at:
http://aag.org/annualmeetings/2010/index.htm
--------------------------------------
Dr Louise Waite
Lecturer in Human Geography
School of Geography
University of Leeds
Woodhouse Lane
Leeds LS2 9JT
Tel +44 (0)113 343 3367
Email [log in to unmask]
Web www.geog.leeds.ac.uk/people/l.waite
For info on the Participatory Geographies Working Group(PYGYWG), please visit:
http://www.pygywg.org/
|