Hi all,

Please find below a call for papers which may be of interest to those on the list,

Best

Dave

--Call for Papers--

Space, Contestation and the Political: A Workshop on Planning, Development and Resistance

To be held at the ETH Zurich, 12^th- 13^th February, 2009.

The deadline for abstracts is 17^th October 2008. Please E-mail your proposals to [log in to unmask]

Organisers:

David Featherstone, Department of Geography, University of Liverpool, UK

Benedikt Korf, Political Geography Division, Department of Geography, University of Zürich, Switzerland

Joris Van Wezemael, Centre for Research on Architecture, Society & the Built Environment ETH CASE, ETH Zürich, Switzerland

Sponsored by Spaces of Democracy/ Democracy of Space Network, ETH Zurich, and Zurich University. In Collaboration with the working group Geography and Decision-making Processes (member of the German Society of Geographers).

In the 1990s in the wake of the end of the cold war some social and political theorists proclaimed the end of political contestation. They argued that categories such as ‘left’ and ‘right’ were now politically redundant (Giddens, 1994, 1997). European centre-left parties broadly shared such an analysis. From the emergence of networked resistances to neo-liberalism to the persistence of violent conflicts in many parts of the world, however, it is clear that contestation continues to be important to the political. Recent theoretical debates have also signalled a reassertion of the centrality of conflict, antagonism and contestation to the political. They have given rise to what we think are an interesting set of debates in geography, planning, development studies and beyond about how to theorise the relations between space, politics and contestation.

This workshop seeks to explore what is at stake in these debates over the relations between space, contestation and the political. It seeks to bring together researchers working on diverse theoretical traditions that have sought to engage with the importance of contestation to the political. The workshop also seeks to foreground how thinking in explicitly spatial terms reconfigures debates on the political. These debates have been framed through the work of Carl Schmitt, the radical democratic project of Laclau and Mouffe, and a number of post-structural theorists including Agamben, Badiou, Connolly, Deleuze, Honig, Latour, Ranciere, and Žižek.

We seek engagements with these bodies of work, one of our central concerns, however, is to disrupt the geographically restricted character of these debates. Thus we are particularly interested in work that thinks about how the relations between space, contestation and the political work out differently in different contexts and places, including the global South.  We are therefore also interested in the relevance of theoretical traditions associated with pan-Africanism, the subaltern studies project and post-colonial theorising more generally.

The workshop seeks to explore these debates through empirically grounded research on different contexts in both the global North and South. In particular we seek contributions related to the following themes. Firstly, planning in the face of uncertainty, diversity, and incommensurability questions the relation of metaphorical ‘spaces of contestation’ and the design, management and accesability of physical places. Secondly, what signals “the political” or “the state” or “democracy” in Africa, Asia and Latin America, especially in countries described as “failing or collapsing” states and how does contestation, antagonism vs consensus play out in these societies? Thirdly, in relation to diverse forms of subaltern politics and resistance movements and the dynamic geographies of contestation and solidarities they shape.

Issues which papers could address include:

• What are the geographies of antagonism/ contestation? What are the different geographies of agonistic and antagonistic practices?
• What are the relations between spatialities and different forms of political violence? How does “the political” play out in different social and political spaces? How do accounts of the relations between space and the political work out differently in different places?
• What are the implications of actor-network theory’s critique of human-centred accounts of the political for accounts of the geographies of contestation? How does the notion of the ‘Parliament of Things’ affect the political in the production of space?
• What are the relations between space, contestation and the constitution of political identities?
• What are the relations between geographies of antagonism and the constitution of solidarities?

Keynotes will be given by:

Clive Barnett, Department of Geography, Open University, UK

Jean Hillier, School of Architecture, Planning and Landscape, University of Newcastle upon Tyne/UK

Jonathan Spencer, School of Social and Political Studies, University of Edinburgh, UK

Mustafa Dikec, Department/ School- not sure of Geography Royal Holloway, University of London, UK 

Oliver Marchart, Soziologisches Seminar der Universität Luzern