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Association of American Geographers Annual Meeting 2012 – February 24-28 - New York City Call for Papers Rethinking Technology and Sustainability in the Space Economy Economic Geography meets Socio-technical Transitions Research Convenors: Jim Murphy, Clark University Lars Coenen, Lund University David Gibbs, University of Hull Bernhard Truffer, Eawag: Swiss Federal Institute of Aquatic Science and Technology The reconfiguration of entire sectors through long term social and technological shifts – so-called socio-technical transitions – have received increasing attention in fields such as Evolutionary Economics, Organization Studies or Science and Technology Studies. In Economic Geography these technological transformation processes have been mostly addressed as industry and cluster life cycles, territorial industrial transformations, and regional or national innovation systems. Despite embracing evolutionary ideas in recent years, economic geographers’ current engagement with technology seems to exhibit some deficiencies: technology is either treated as marginal, “blackboxed” in ways that hide its socio-economic construction, oversimplified as knowledge alone, and/or treated merely as material objects mobilized in relation to other forces in the space economy (e.g., social networks, conventions, institutions, or class relations). In the proposed session stream, we seek papers that provide insights into the ways in which theoretically-rich questions about (disruptive) technology formation and socio-technical transformations might become more central to economic geography research, particularly through an engagement with recent research on socio-technical transitions (e.g., see Truffer, 2008; Truffer and Coenen, 2011; Hodson and Marvin 2010; Bulkeley, 2011; Coenen and Truffer 2012; Cooke, 2010; Gibbs, 2009; Bridge, 2010). The goal of the session is to build more coherent and substantive ties between the work of economic geographers, science and technology scholars, and transition theorists and to inspire novel economic-geography research on technology’s meaning, constitution, impact, development and diffusion; research that is tuned to pressing questions about environmental and social sustainability and which demonstrates how socio-technical transitions research can benefit significantly from a more nuanced and deeper engagement with spatial and geographical concepts. More specifically, we seek papers that can speak to one or more of the following questions: • How do economic geographers currently conceptualize or understand technology and technological change? What kinds of socio-technical transitions are currently studied by economic geographers and what theoretical/conceptual ideas are used to examine them? • In what ways can economic geographers contribute to theories of technological change, diffusion, or transition that more adequately account for power relations, place-specific contingencies, and/or a wider range of sociotechnical practices, relationships, and actors? . • How might economic geographers reconsider the agency-structure debate in the context of socio-technical transformations (particularly addressing multi-scalar processes and drawing on recent insights from evolutionary, institutional, and/or relational economic geography)? • How can a focus on technology and technological change help economic geographers to engage with crucial questions related to the environmental and social sustainability of regional development processes? • What scales are most appropriate for studying socio-technical transitions or technological transformations? Depending on the level of interest and quality of the submitted contributions, we foresee the possibility to edit a special issue in a leading economic geography journal. Abstracts of no more than 250 words should be submitted to Jim Murphy ([log in to unmask] ), Lars Coenen ([log in to unmask]), David Gibbs ([log in to unmask]), and/or Bernhard Truffer ([log in to unmask]) before September 10, 2011.