Dear all,
We are looking for a couple of extra papers to make up a second session and so have extended the deadline until Monday 27th October. If you know anyone who is doing work on embodiment who may be interested in being part of these sessions, please forward on.
Best
Bethan
Apologies for cross-posting
AAG 2015 CFP: Geographies of Body Size and Materiality
In 2006, when the AAG was last in Chicago, it featured the first sessions on Geographies of Fatness/Bigness/Corporeality. Since then, there has been significant growth in geographical work which questions the taken for granted assumptions about fatness, expanding to include broader questions about body size, form and materiality. Taking into consideration this year's conference theme of "radical intra-disciplinarity," there remains significant scope for geographical and interdisciplinary research on body size and materiality to contribute to activist and academic debate in relation to class, race, gender, disability, sexuality, bodily change, lifecourse, temporalities, mobilities, (bio/geo)politics etc. Recently, the ways in which fat is figured in dominant discourse has shifted along with new medical ideas and political ideologies including concerns about the rise of obesity in the majority world, concern about sugar and artificial sweeteners (rather than fat), an increase in gastric band and obesity surgeries, the rise of the quantified self movement, austerity politics, and concerns about the intersection between fatness and climate change. These are bringing new forms of bio- and geo-politics into debates about body size and materiality and implicating new spaces as significant for intervention and sized/material embodied experiences. We are looking for papers that interrogate the range of spaces and relations through which bodies come to matter in terms of size and materiality.
Possible questions:
- How do recent political and medical shifts affect understandings of embodied difference?
- How are concerns about obesity in the majority world affecting critical geographies of body size?
- In what ways does body size and materiality matter differently in different places?
- What intersectional politics is bodily difference in relation to body size and materiality drawn into?
- How might queer and disability theory contribute to a progressive politics surrounding body size and materiality?
- How might political ecology contribute to a critical understanding of the relationships between body size, materiality and environment?
- How does body size and materiality intersect with other public health concerns?
- How might a focus on body size contribute to the development of geographical work on materiality, emotion and affect?
- What new medical and cosmetic technologies are allowing interventions surrounding body size and materiality and how might recent geographical work on non-humans and corporeal technologies contribute to understandings of these technologies?
Session organised by Bethan Evans (University of Liverpool), Deborah McPhail (University of Manitoba), Nicole Mixson-Perez (Baptist Health) and Rachel Colls (Durham University). Please send abstracts to Bethan Evans ([log in to unmask]) and Deborah McPhail ([log in to unmask]) by Monday 27th October. You will then need to register online and provide us with your PIN for inclusion in the session by 4th November. Further information on the AAG meeting is available here: http://www.aag.org/cs/annualmeeting.
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