Apologies for cross-posting. Please find below a call for papers for the RGS-IBG 2013.
CFP RGS-IBG Conference London 28-30th Aug 2013: Historical Geographies of Internationalism (1900s-1960s)
Organisers: Mike Heffernan (University of Nottingham), Jake Hodder (University of Nottingham), Stephen Legg (University of Nottingham)
Recent works in historical geography have engaged with the international as a concept, a scalar network, a form of mobility and a political affiliation that, though with earlier origins and later manifestations, was of particular significance in the first half of the twentieth century. These studies have examined the geographies of political networks, revolutionary friendships, the League of Nations, new forms of cartography, capitalist internationalisms and the critical geographies of international research. In part, these works mark geography’s growing rapprochement with international relations in recent years, based on a common and interwoven agenda to re-think the potential of the international as the most urgent scale at which governance, political activity and political resistance has to operate when confronting the larger environmental, economic and strategic challenges of the 21st century. However, this rapprochement has rarely acknowledged that internationalism has both a history and a geography, which is the epistemic space in which we situate these sessions. They will counter-pose investigations of “the international” and internationalism as a means of exploring the coherent and divergent usages of this amorphous concept. We particularly encourage papers which address the following questions:
• How did the international relate to the imperial? How did they have different geographical (and scalar) imaginations and infrastructural networks?
• What does the “inter” mean in relation to the “national”? How does it relate to trans-nationalism? Who could articulate the international? To what extent was it an inter-nationa-state-ism?
• What were the racial assumptions behind internationalism? Who could perform it? Did it have immanent revolutionary potential? What is it relationship to cosmopolitanism? Or to anti-colonialism/de-colonisation?
• Did the international provide an ethico-humanitarian mask for economic imperialism? Can internationalism be seen as an aggressive international manifestation of American nationalism? How did Cold War geopolitics begin to transform the potential of internationalism?
• What moral codes were used to inspire internationalisms? Religious? Humanitarian? Secular humanist?
• What are the histories and geographies behind environmental problems and challenges, including climate change, which are often presented as requiring international agreements and solutions?
Abstracts of no more than 250 words should be sent to Mike Heffernan ([log in to unmask]), Jake Hodder ([log in to unmask]) and Stephen Legg ([log in to unmask]) by 21st January 2013.
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