*Apologies for cross postings*
RGS-IBG Annual Conference 31st August - 2nd September 2011
Call for Papers - ‘New Imperial Geographies’?
Sponsored by the Historical Geography Research Group, and the History and Philosophy of Geography Research Group
Convened by David Lambert (Royal Holloway, University of London/Exeter College, University of Oxford) and Stephen Legg (University of Nottingham)
These sessions will offer an opportunity to reflect on the diverse ways through which imperialism is being approached from within and without the geographical discipline. Over the past forty years geographers have approached the creation, functioning and dissolution of empires from a variety of perspectives, including the political economy of imperial free trade, colonial cartography, socio-cultural investigations of nationalism and anti-colonialism, and the material and psychological impact of ‘peripheral’ imperialism on ‘metropolitan’ countries. At the same time, contemporary imperial studies have been invigorated by a spatial turn that has seen concepts of scale, webs and networks augment older concerns about ‘core and periphery’ and prompt exploratory methodologies of comparison and connection between imperial sites. Many of these developments have been influenced by postcolonial studies, as routed through the ‘new imperial history’. While post-colonial geography has been the subject of various recent textbooks and edited collections, imperial geographies remain less well debated. These sessions will aim to fill this lacuna by encouraging debate about the strengths and weaknesses of imperial geographical scholarship. They will draw attention to the following:
- Methodology: empirical work that entails quantitative analysis, detailed micro-geographies, comparative and connective work, as well as qualitative analysis of representations, senses, bodies and places;
- Postcolonialism: how imperial studies have learnt from debates about othering, subalternism, representation, privilege, resistance, textualism, race and space while not being constrained by these critical checks;
- Metaphors and models of space: how research within and beyond geography has been structured and influenced by ideas regarding networks, webs, scales, places environments and more-than-human worlds;
- The public sphere: the role and use of exhibitions, archives and museums as an aspect of imperialism and a means of reflecting upon it.
We envisage panels dealing with the following themes and encourage the submission of abstracts that address:
- anticolonialism/nationalism
- biographical geographies
- decolonisation
- European, imperial and international legal geographies
- exploration, cartography and mapping
- institutions of governance
- knowledge and science
- landscapes
- metropolitan/domestic imperial formations
- moral and spiritual regulation
- museums and display
- nature/ecological imperialism
- representations
The deadline for paper proposals is Monday 24 January 2011. Please send these to both David Lambert ([log in to unmask]) and Steve Legg ([log in to unmask]). When submitting proposals please include the following information: 1) name; 2) institutional affiliation; 3) contact e-mail; 4) title of proposed paper; 5) abstract (no more than 250 words); and 6) any technical requirements (e.g. video, data projector, sound).
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Dr David Lambert
Reader in Historical Geography, Royal Holloway, University of London
Visiting Fellow at Exeter College, University of Oxford
http://www.gg.rhul.ac.uk/Lambert/