Call for papers: RGS-IBG Annual International Conference, Cardiff University, 28–31 August 2018
Performance metaphors and the scripting of geopolitics: creativity, discourse and embodiment.
Session organisers: Dr Amanda Rogers (Swansea University), Dr Charlotte Veal (Coventry University)
Recent years have witnessed a proliferating use of metaphors in research on political geography and geopolitics (Barnes and Duncan, 2013). Metaphors have long been shown to produce geopolitical effects by, for instance, reinforcing or disrupting world orders, or by rendering people or places ‘knowable’ and thus open to practices of intervention and warfare (Lakoff, 1991; Reid-Henry, 2012). As such, research has paid close attention to the real and performative work that metaphors do in the world, and to the geographies they both represent and forge.
Specifically, this session explores how performance is mobilised as a metaphor that (re)produces geopolitical landscapes of power, oppression, exploitation and conflict. Performative metaphors have long exposed the practical enactment of power by the state and other agencies (such as in ideas around improvisation, rehearsal and mimicry), and enabled the interrogation of how narratives around violence, war and peace are produced and circulated. Concurrently, discourses of nationalism, militarism and warfare are being performed with very material effects. The multiplicity of performance as a conceptual terrain therefore intersects with, and illuminates, varied understandings of practice and creativity. The session is interested in exploring these vocabularies to broaden our understanding of the constitution of critical and embodied geopolitics.
Potential topics include (but are not limited to):
• ‘Geobodily’ metaphors and geopolitical landscapes
• Geopolitics and performativity
• Siting and staging political action
• Theatres of diplomacy
• Staging militarism and warfare
• Everyday geopolitics and creative practices
• The relationship between metaphor, imagination, and creative practice
• Metaphorical violence, ambivalence and multivalency
• Metaphor as method in embodied and critical geopolitics
Please send abstracts of no more than 250 words, along with a title, author affiliation and email address, to both Amanda Rogers ([log in to unmask]) and Charlotte Veal ([log in to unmask]) by 31st January 2018.
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