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Relations, flows and processes: reinventing the political Proposal for paper and panel sessions at the 2003 AAG meeting, New Orleans. Organisers: Noel Castree and Neil Coe, University of Manchester (contact: [log in to unmask]) In recent years, geographers have contributed to, and occasionally led, interdisciplinary efforts to redefine the domain of the 'political'. Inspired by actor-network theory (e.g. Whatmore, 2002), certain strands of post-structuralism (e.g. Doel, 1999), 'new dialectics' (e.g. Harvey, 1996) and broader currents of post-analytical thinking (e.g. Massey, 1999), the ontological distinctions that have traditionally grounded definitions of what count as political subjects and objects are being challenged. As binaries like local/global, place/space, individual/society, organic/inorganic, machine/animal and nature/culture give way to notions of 'flowmations', 'networks', 'rhizomes' and 'imbroglios', there's a sense that what Latour (1999), in Pandora's Hope, calls a 'new political settlement' may be afoot. And yet, more than a decade since Haraway's (1991) richly suggestive cyborg manifesto, the content of an 'amodern' politics arguably remains elusive. Though geographers and fellow travellers now possess a rich set of metaphors for rethinking the political, new substantive political vocabularies are only now starting to emerge for instance, (for example, in relation to animals [Philo and Wilbert, 2000] and transnational citizenship [Ong, 1999]). The proposed paper and panel sessions are intended to bring together human geographers from across the discipline whose work trangresses conventional political divides and unsettles entrenched political concepts. It approaches 'politics' in the broadest sense, in both theory and practice. Contributions are invited from those working on hybrid social identities, the rights of 'non-humans', transnational collectives, syncretic resistance movements and so on. Discussion of meta-political questions, political concepts and substantive political cases are welcomed. The sessions will address the following kinds of questions: can non-humans be political subjects and in what senses?; what new political concepts are appropriate to a 'post-human', 'glocal', 'hybrid' world?; how might these concepts inform and learn from real struggles?; where and with whom/what do political needs, deserts and entitlements now lie?; what value do traditional political concepts still have for a politics of space, place and nature?; is the political trope of 'representation' still appropriate and relevant?