Final Call for Papers
RGS-IBG AC 2024, London (27th - 30th August 2024)
Geography and Contingency
Ruth Machen (Newcastle University): [log in to unmask]
Joe Blakey (The University of Manchester): [log in to unmask]
This session explores contingency's evolving conceptual significance and role within Geography. Contingency is often overlooked yet core to geographical concerns (Barry 2016). Moments of contingency invariably occur within spatial and temporal contexts, whilst contingency's rejection of necessity and determinism resonates with post-structural paradigms infusing geographic thought (Ermakoff 2015; Jong 2023; Simandan 2010). The concept therefore finds prominence across diverse geographical domains including critical realist, assemblage, postcolonial, and post-foundational enquiry (Ash 2020; Barry 2016; Landau-Donnelly and Pohl 2023). However, while contingency was arguably once fetishised (Simandan, 2010), we detect occasional scepticism towards the concept (c.f Harvey 1987), or at least caution that contingency can be over-emphasised (Ash 2020; Simandan, 2010).
Geographers engage contingency explicitly and implicitly, in often distinct ways. Beyond its everyday sense of dependence on certain conditions, contingency may signify sensitivity to minor variations, unpredictability and indeterminacy (Simandan 2010; Sterelny 2016; Herrick 2016; Ermakoff 2015). Often slippery, it can be a discursive device, process, or set of properties (Nicols 2019; Ermakoff 2015) and may be incidental or instrumental. Encapsulating contradiction and unresolved tensions, contingency both signals potentiality and political possibility (Herrick 2016; Nichols 2019; Landau-Donnelly and Pohl, 2023; Anderson 2010), and establishes particular boundaries, orders and affects, for instance feeding machine-learning algorithms that profit from disorder (Amoore 2023). It alludes to how difference, responses, and futures might emerge, but also how we anchor ourselves amidst uncertainty (Barry 2016).
We invite theoretically engaged contributions advancing geographical understandings of contingency across diverse empirical and thematic domains. Submissions may explore:
- What are the points of divergence and convergence in conceptualising contingency?
- How else might contingency be thought?
- How is contingency geographical?
- What are the geographies of contingency?
- How is contingency encountered in the field?
- What are the traps and opportunities in thinking with contingency?
- How might contingency be approached methodologically?
To submit an abstract, please email the title, presenter information and abstract of no more than 300 words to [log in to unmask] and [log in to unmask] by the end of Friday 23rd February.
The format will be a traditional paper session. Whilst an in-person session is proposed, we are able to adapt to a hybrid format should it be required.
References
Amoore, L., 2023. Machine learning political orders. Review of International Studies, 49(1), pp.20-36.
Anderson, B., 2010. Preemption, precaution, preparedness: Anticipatory action and future geographies. Progress in Human Geography, 34(6), pp.777-798.
Ash, J., 2020. Flat ontology and geography. Dialogues in Human Geography, 10(3), pp.345-361.
Barry, A., 2016. The Politics of Contingency. https://lost-research-group.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/SPP1448_WP19_Barry.pdf
Ermakoff, I., 2015. The structure of contingency. American Journal of Sociology, 121(1), pp.64-125.
Herrick, C., 2016. Global health, geographical contingency, and contingent geographies. Annals of the American Association of Geographers, 106(3), pp.672-687.
Jong, A., 2023. Social configurations in the moment of post-foundationalism. Frontiers in Sociology, 7(1078011).
Landau-Donnelly, F. and Pohl, L., 2023. Towards a post-foundational geography: Spaces of negativity, contingency, and antagonism. Progress in Human Geography, 47(4): 481--499.
Nichols, C.E., 2019. Geographic contingency, affective facts, and the politics of global nutrition policy. Geoforum, 105, pp.179-190
Sterelny, K., 2016. Contingency and history. Philosophy of Science, 83(4), pp.521-539.
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