Final CFP for Nordic Geographers Meeting in Reykjavik Iceland, 11-14 June 2013.
Feeling in Common: Making and Enacting Convivial Spaces
Leila Dawney, School of Environment and Technology, University of Brighton & Karolina Doughty, School of Applied Social Science, University of Brighton.
Recent events such as the London ‘riots’ of summer 2011 have led to a resurgence in debates around the loss of community and the problem of social cohesion. This debate has centred on an alleged ‘crisis of community’ and conceptualisations of public spaces and communal life has started to attend to the ambivalences of complex social reality in the ‘doing’ and performance of common identities. The ‘big society’ political rhetoric raises similar questions about community formation in an individualised, atomised world. Finally, recent ‘occupy’ movements have brought contestations of the ‘common’ to the forefront of political debate in producing new spaces for the forging of collective political subjectivities and the rhetoric of capture and enclosure is clear in many critiques of contemporary capitalism (Hardt and Negri 2011).
This session invites contributions that address the idea of collective spaces, and explore those perhaps fleeting moments when a sense of shared life, or shared stakes, is felt. As such, we are interested in processes, practices, performances through which “commoning” (Linebaugh 2008) occurs; from the extraordinary to the mundane and prosaic. Connected to this year’s theme of responsible geographies, we also invite considerations of questions about the ethical and political implications of common spaces and their different generative capacities for ‘publicness’; How can collective forms of life be fostered or encouraged? What is the emancipatory potential of the collectivity? How can we recognise our shared stakes in caring for life, space and the future and what material conditions enable this?
This session invites theoretical and empirical contributions from but not limited to:
• New formulations of the idea of enclosure, the commons and the social
• Spaces of public (creative, musical, participatory) performance
• Neighbourhood practices
• Collective practices and conviviality
• Spaces of political action
• Performative/enacting approaches to spaces of conviviality
• Materialist/affective accounts of collective experience
• Herds, swarms and non-human or hybrid collectives
Hardt, M. and A. Negri (2011). Commonwealth. Cambridge, Ma, Harvard University Press.
Linebaugh, P. (2008). The Magna Carta Manifesto: Liberties and Commons for All. Berkeley and Los Angeles, University of California Press.
We welcome abstracts of 250 words to be submitted to us through the conference website: http://conference.hi.is/ngm2013/feeling-in-common/ by 31 January.
Dr Karolina Doughty
Research Fellow
School of Applied Social Science
University of Brighton
Brighton BN1 9PH
Tel 01273 643904
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