With apologies for cross posting:

2024 RSA Annual Conference, Florence, Italy, 11-14 June 2024

CFP: ‘Left Behind’ or ‘New Fronts’? Peripheral Places and Regions Amid Global Challenges (Edgy Matters) (Open Session)

Session Organisers:
Grete Gansauer Montana State University, USA
Michael Howcroft University of Glasgow, UK
Bryonny Goodwin-Hawkins University of Gloucestershire, UK
Joanie Willett University of Exeter, UK

The political and academic rediscovery of so-called ‘left-behind places’ and ‘geographies of discontent’ has ignited new interest in peripheral places and regions. Now, research and policy must look beyond headline narratives that collapse the complex diversities of the myriad places that are ‘non-core’, or on the ‘edge’ of core activities, including but not limited to rural, semi-rural, post-industrial, de-populating and sparsely populated areas. That too many places have not mattered for too long calls for new ways of reckoning with peripherality, and for problematising the complex, multidimensional roles of peripheral places and regions amid global challenges.

This Edgy Matters special session is convened by EdgeNet, the RSA’s research network on peripheral places and regions. We aim to convene critical conversations among a growing community of researchers who are working to reinvigorate the study of peripherality within (and beyond) regional studies. For 2024, we ask whether reducing non-core regions to a ‘left behind’ condition minimises their (potential) role/s in collaborative responses to global challenges. To be marginal is to have limited agency at the edge of core spaces of political life – but also to forge identities, find empowerment, and articulate values. How might social, economic and geographic “margins” represent new fronts for transformative thinking and action?
We invite papers that engage with questions of peripherality, broadly conceived, and challenge the social, spatial, economic, environmental, and temporal inter-relationships that shape how peripheries are imagined, governed, lived and felt. We are especially interested in ‘edgy’ contributions that bring fresh methodological and conceptual insights, or introduce new areas and ideas to RSA audiences. Perspectives ‘from the margins’ and scholars who may themselves feel ‘on the edge’ of regional studies are also warmly welcomed.

Potential topics might include:

• ‘Edgy’ examples of social, cultural and political change in non-core areas
• Role of peripheral spaces and non-cores in broader national sustainability transitions, or in response to global challenges
• Theorisations of lived, felt and/or imagined peripheralism (e.g. rural, remote, post-industrial, topological, peripheries-within-cores).
• Reinterpreting the relationships between cores and peripheries.
• Peripheries as spaces of exploitation, extraction, collaboration, and innovation.
• Peripherality in territorial policy, place-based policy and sustainable developmental pathways.
• Local economic futures and territorial well-being in peripheral places.

Please visit the RSA Annual Conference site and submit your abstract on the abstract submission page before the deadline of January 30th. https://www.regionalstudies.org/news/2024annual-special-sessions/#!

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