Apologies for cross-posting.
1st Call for Papers.
Conference: RGS-IBG Annual Meeting, 31st August to 2nd September 2011, London.
Session: ‘Performative Imaginations, Cultural Formations and Political Subjectivities’.
Organizers: JD Dewsbury (University of Bristol) and Paul Simpson (University of Plymouth)
Sponsors: History and Philosophy of Geography Research Group
During the 1990s human geography underwent something of a performative turn engaging with performance studies and broader social theoretical concerns shaping understandings of cultural formations across race, gender, sexuality and ethnicity. These engagements emphasized the iterative and constitutive dynamics in the economic, artistic, political and more micro and emergent embodiments of the social. Performances as mundane everyday practices were thus articulated in post-foundational terms as emergent and finding consistency through their (re)enactment rather than as a result of some kind of pre-existent essential trait. However, arguably, this proliferation of a performative approach among geographers of various backgrounds and sub-disciplinary allegiance is yet to spotlight the fundamental challenges of the idea for the geographic imagination. These sessions will offer a moment to pause and reflect on the use, different approaches, and implications of the concept of performativity in scripting our geographical arguments and, in particular, to show the co-production of theory and practice in thinking the relations of culture, society and politics in performative and practical frameworks.
Papers might include:
Political Implications
- The politics of performativity in identity formation, cultural expressions and technologies of calculation, dissemination and reflection.
- Performative spaces from institutional rationales and acts of governance, to event space-times materialized through architecture, protocol and material affects.
Conceptual Purchases
- Performativity in post-continental philosophy, feminist theory and queer theory.
- Performativity as an instance of (post)phenomenology and as an act of phenomenality questioning the metaphysical or anti-foundational logic of presence, absence, and (dis)appearance.
Material Practices
- The performativity of matter from speculative realism to the material agency of Bennett and Ahmed.
- Performance versus the performative including resolutions through habit, routine and practice.
Please send abstracts of no more than 250 words to both Paul ([log in to unmask]) and JD ([log in to unmask]) by 4 February 2011.
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