Apologies for cross-posting.
 
Bicycle Politics Symposium and workshop - http://www.lancs.ac.uk/fass/centres/cemore/event/3299/
 
16 & 17 September 2010, Lancaster University, UK
 
Bicycle Politics, a two day event hosted by the Centre for Mobilities Research (CeMoRe) at Lancaster University, UK, aims to explore bicycles and cycling politically. By thinking creatively and critically, its political project is to help push bicycles and cycling further into the hearts of our cities and societies, to improve the possibilities for cycling to re-make our world, to assist cycling's obvious potential to contribute to alternative, sustainable mobility futures.
To this end, we are calling for critical explorations of the political, social, cultural and economic barriers to current and future cycling, as well as for critical investigations of the ways in which bicycles, cycling and cyclists are currently framed.
Our intention is to produce an edited collection, Bicycle Politics, from the event.
 
The Mobilities of the Super-rich: A Workshop at Lancaster University -
http://www.lancs.ac.uk/fass/centres/cemore/event/3329/
 
21 September 2010, 10.30am-6.00pm, Lancaster University, UK
 
Small in number but great in influence, the super-rich shape the contours of global capitalism. Occupying the top tier of the so-called human pyramid their activities are scrutinized, emulated, and benchmarked in the production of urban and leisure landscapes; the power-knowledge venues that underpin and demonstrate their success. The super-rich are instrumental in the socialization of desire for unattainable and unsustainable standards of consumption styled as luxury, privilege, prestige, and 'class'. These associations form a brand vocabulary that the global elite aspire to and promote through an embarrassment of riches that manifest in venues like Dubai, perhaps the wildest materialization of an age of excess. The extravagant lifestyles of the super-rich modulate between these nodes of power and free-floating, unhindered mobility.
The workshop will discuss the methodological and conceptual challenges of researching the mobilities of global elites at a time of economic crisis, growing scarcity of resources, and emergent economic and political powers.
 
BRICS on the Move - http://www.lancs.ac.uk/fass/centres/cemore/event/3358/
 
12 November 2010, Lancaster University, UK
 
Call for Papers - The acronym BRICs (Brazil, Russia, India, China) was coined by the Goldman Sachs consultant Jim O'Neill in 2001. It has since become a common umbrella term in media, academic and government rhetoric about the future potential of these 'emerging giants', in particular the threat/opportunity that these economies present to the developed world. The regionalised perspective of BRICs encourages a commodified picture of these countries around major risks/opportunities: investment, global hegemony, social transformation and climate change. The BRICs is the West/North's dream of a new East/South with geo-political status and power to rival the developed world. Indeed, much BRICs discourse echoes Cold War rhetoric, which in turn resonates with the unspeakable commonality (for investors at least) that all four of the BRICs were (or remain, in title) socialist states.
 
Turbulent Trade Routes - http://www.lancs.ac.uk/fass/centres/cemore/event/3238/
 
26 November 2010, Lancaster University, UK
 
Organized by the Mediterranean Mobilities Research Network - Centre for Mobilities Research.
After decades of globalization a renewed interest in trade routes is being triggered at the policy level by a shifting geopolitical landscape that is seeing global economic, political and military influence tilting towards the East. In what is being called an age of new empires, the growing demand of natural resources -especially oil-, the environmental transformations ushered by global warming, the growth of piracy associated with 'failed states' and the expanding and contested spheres of influence of new regional powers seem to herald a turbulent future for trade routes.
The aim of this workshop is to discuss trade routes from a critical social science perspective, especially in relation with global warming, technological and geopolitical change.