CALL FOR PAPERS RGS

Annual Conference 2012 3-5th July, Edinburgh

Constructing Security: Pastoralism, Identity and Environment

Contemporary analyses of security amongst rural dwellers in the global south and post-Soviet contexts, excluding research concerned with violent conflict, typically focus on aspects of food security, land rights or environmental degradation, increasingly in the context of climate vulnerability and adaptation. However, to date there has been relatively little exploration of how place-based, personal notions of security are understood, constructed and experienced by resource dependent rural communities, households and individual actors, often in response to multiple, evolving dimensions of economic, political and environmental risk. In particular, we argue, there are critical omissions around contemporary pastoral identities. For example, how these are safeguarded and constructed by diverse pastoralist groups in marginal and contested environments; the role of landscape, nature and beliefs in shaping identity and security and the wider political/ developmental processes which frame and shape these struggles. Such analyses are timely, given the increasing prominence of pastoralist groups in environmental justice struggles, identity and conservation politics and in debates over adaptation strategies across multiple scales.

This session invites papers which engage with these issues in diverse rural contexts and with reference to a range of themes and debates in contemporary geography, for example, environmental justice; identity and nature; cultural change; political ecology. The proposed session format will be 4 x 15 minute presentations followed by a discussion.

Please send 300 word abstracts to both Dr Caroline Upton ([log in to unmask]) and Dr Kate Moore ([log in to unmask]) to arrive by 23rd January 2012.

Session organisers:

Dr Caroline Upton ([log in to unmask]), Dr Kate Moore ([log in to unmask])  Department of Geography, University of Leicester, Leicester LE1 7RH