Please see updated call for the workshop below. Note that we now have
funding for hosting the selected participants.
Looking forward
best,
anu


Critical Geography South Asia (CGSA) Workshop @ IISER MOHALI
June 29- July 3rd, 2019


Critical Geography South Asia (CGSA) is an informal group of geographers,
activists, and students who have been discussing and debating matters
concerning social justice in the broadly defined South Asian region. In
2015, we held our first meeting titled Radical Convergence: Critical
Geographies of South Asia at the Sambhaavnaa Institute in Himachal. The
goal of the workshop was to bring together academics and activists to
discuss various aspects of the larger political-economic context, as well
to develop a roadmap for possible collaborations. In 2016, we organized an
International Workshop on Critical Geographies of the Himalayan Region at
IISER Mohali.

We are excited to announce a call for participation at our third event.
This year we propose to engage with the theme ‘feminist and queer urban
geographies’

Feminist and Queer Urban Geographies
It is common knowledge that we live in a rapidly urbanizing world. In
response, a rich and multidisciplinary scholarship has flourished that
continues to grapple with the complex nature of these transformations.
Geographers have made critical contributions, enabling ways of thinking
that emphasize relationality between people and places, between the
social, political and the economic, and between the multiple scales that
frame urbanism (Peake, 2016). In turn, feminist interventions have brought
into focus the affective experiences of urban space and conceptualized the
city as liberating but also constraining (Bondi and Rose, 2003). Feminist
geographers have pointed out the ‘taken for grantedness’ of urban
space while queer geographies have critiqued the essentialization of
gendered categories which often reinforces gendered social relations and
remains exclusionary despite its promises (Knopp, 2007).

We envisage this five-day international workshop as a coming together of
the varied strands within feminist and queer urban geographies to revisit
Hayden’s 1980’s essay “What would a non-sexist city look like?” We
argue that in the contemporary moment of neoliberal development reflecting
in cities of the north and south through aspirations of ‘globality’
and impositions of the ‘smart city’, it is all the more urgent to
attend to the concerns of inclusivity - to bring people back into space.
To celebrate the diversity that urban spaces offer - to the young,
elderly, men, women, queer, black, white, brown, resident, migrant and so
on - but equally to be attentive to their subjective experiences.


A tentative schedule of this reading, engaging, writing workshop is as
follows:

Day 1: How is feminist knowledge about the urban produced and in what way
does it challenge or reaffirm knowledge produced in urban geography?

Day 2: Drawing upon the feminist and queer epistemological approaches that
connect the intimate with the global and have complicated the notion of
scale, how is the urban to be studied? How does our understanding of the
urban differ as we deploy varied spatial registers of the body, the
region, the nation, the global and of infrastructural assemblages or
mobilities?

Day 3: Field visits to sites in and around Chandigarh - informal
discussions on the thematics identified over the last two days

Day 4: Revisit: What would a non-sexist city look like?

Day 5: Writing day

References:
Bondi, Liz, and Damaris Rose. "Constructing gender, constructing the
urban: a review of Anglo-American feminist urban geography." Gender, Place
and Culture: A Journal of Feminist Geography 10.3 (2003): 229-245.

Knopp, Larry. "On the relationship between queer and feminist
geographies." The Professional Geographer 59.1 (2007): 47-55.

Peake, Linda. "On feminism and feminist allies in knowledge production in
urban geography." Urban Geography 37.6 (2016): 830-838.


Workshop dates and venue: Tentatively,  June 29th-July 3rd, 2019 at IISER
Mohali

Registrations: All interested participants are required to send a one page
expression of interest discussing why they are interested in the workshop.
Also, list 5 relevant publications that you would like to read and discuss
with the collective. The last date for submission of the expression of
interest is April 15, 2019. Please email [log in to unmask] with
'CGSA workshop 2019' in the subject line. Selected participants will be
notified by May 1, so they can make their travel arrangements in time. We
will issue invitation letters to facilitate leave and visa processes but
cannot provide travel funding.

Participation in the workshop is free and we will offer boarding and
lodging for selected participants on campus. Childcare is available on
campus.

For CGSA
Anu Sabhlok (IISER Mohali) and Rohit Negi (AUD)




-- 
Anu Sabhlok
Associate Professor and HoD
Department of Humanities and Social Sciences
Indian Institute of Science Education and Research Mohali (IISER Mohali)
Sector 81, SAS Nagar, 140306
+91 9878995419


Let me say at the risk of appearing ridiculous, that the true
revolutionary is guided by strong feelings of love. It is impossible to
think of an authentic revolution without this quality -Che Guevara

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