*Apologies for cross-posting*
Second Call For Papers: Imagined Ruralities
Paper session at the RGS-IBG Annual International Conference 2011, London, 31 Aug - 2 Sept 2011, www.rgs.org/AC2011
Convenors: Susanne Seymour (University of Nottingham); Daniel Keech (University of Southampton) and Charles Watkins (University of Nottingham)
Sponsored by: Rural Geography Research Group
Imaginative geographies are powerful not only in creating compelling ideals but also in shaping the world and human identities of nation, locality and self. This session seeks to examine the different ways in which the rural has been a site of individual and social geographical imagination and the effects of such imaginings for people and places. It builds on a considerable body of work in rural geography which has considered rural imaginaries, for example in terms of migration and lived experience, gender identities, commodification, tourism, economic diversification, preservation and alternative lifestyles, to pose a series of questions about 'imagined ruralities'.
Firstly, how are rural areas currently being imagined? How do past imaginings affect the present? How do these imaginings vary across cultural boundaries and between social groups? What is beyond a rural imaginary? Has the imaginative impulse moved from the rural?
Secondly, what are the imaginative forms being deployed and by whom? How are they produced? What is the role of rural utopian and dystopian thinking?
Thirdly, what are the implications of rural imaginings for individuals, social groupings and places beyond and within 'the rural'? How are such imaginings remaking rural areas, facilitating certain developments and restraining others? How do they challenge definitions of place? How are they influencing the performance of individual and collective identities?
This is a broad call which welcomes papers from a spectrum of rural imaginings, in forms as diverse as novels and poetry, TV and new electronic media, to maps and policy documents.
Please send abstracts up to a maximum of 250 words and proposed titles (clearly stating name, institution, and contact details) to Susanne Seymour ([log in to unmask]), Dan Keech ([log in to unmask]) and Charles Watkins ([log in to unmask]) by Friday 11th February 2011.
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