Call for Papers - NZGS/IAG Conference, Auckland, July 11th-14th 2018
Session title: "Problematizing the Empirical" (sponsored by the Cultural Study Group)
Session organizers: JD Dewsbury (UNSW Canberra), Scott Sharpe (UNSW Canberra) and Tom Roberts (UNSW Canberra)
Abstract:
Cultural geography has been a vanguard for presenting an expanded sense of what the empirical can be for social science. From landscape as text to feminist presentations of embodiment, cultural geographers have emphasized the situatedness of the empirical in its spatiotemporal production through various social, material, technical and aesthetic registers. In recent years, however, cultural geographers have experimented with theoretical frameworks that, by radically decentering the human, call for approaches to the empirical that are less humanistic in their assumptions about the world. In this session we would like to take stock of the role of the empirical in contemporary cultural geography, in relation to new and emerging modes of thought within the discipline. How, for instance, might notions of ‘vital materialism’, ‘re-naturalization’ and ‘post-phenomenology’ provoke new relationships with the empirical within geographical research? What do theories of assemblage and object-oriented approaches do to the shape, form and status of our empirics? And to what extent might geographical commitments to the affectual and incorporeal elements of experience help to elicit more speculative modes of empirical enquiry? We therefore invite contributions that seek to ‘problematize’ stock notions of subjectivity, objectivity, authenticity and legitimacy through modes of empirical experimentation and theoretical speculation.
Please send abstracts to Tom Roberts ([log in to unmask]) by Monday 26th March.
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