 |
 |
FYI -- Dr Michelle Bastian Chancellor’s Fellow, Edinburgh College of Art University of Edinburgh phone: 0131 6515779 email: [log in to unmask] web: www.michellebastian.net -- The University of Edinburgh is a charitable body, registered in Scotland, with registration number SC005336. -----Original Message----- From: A forum for critical and radical geographers [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Leah Gibbs Sent: 24 March 2014 12:13 To: [log in to unmask] Subject: 2nd cfp - IAG/NZGS 2014: 'Nonhuman agency' IAG/NZGS 2014 2nd call for papers IAG/NZGS Joint conference, 30th June - 2nd July, Melbourne University 'Nonhuman agency' Session organisers: Leah Gibbs (University of Wollongong), Andrew Warren (University of New England) and Charles Gillon (University of Wollongong) This session is concerned with the agency of nonhumans in shaping environmental politics, environmental decisions, and everyday encounters. Nonhuman agency is currently the subject of research across cultural and posthumanist geographies, political ecology and political economy. Each of these fields brings into focus different aspects of the agency of nonhumans, as well as a range of critiques. Political economic research has been critiqued for adopting an overly constrained view of agency, and for failing to confront the political subjectivity of socio-natures. 'The inadvertent consequence is a failure to address the full scope of environmental processes' (Bakker 2010 PiHG). Cultural geography - and especially posthumanist approaches - have extended agency beyond the human realm, to consider agency of animals and objects, and more recently plants and elements (including freshwater and the sea). However, such accounts of distributive agency have been critiqued for flattening relations too much. Accounts of nonhuman agency enable better understanding of events and relations, the implications of environmental decisions and actions, and present opportunities to pose alternate questions of conceptual and practical importance. This session seeks to advance interrogation of the role of the agency of nonhuman animals, plants, elements, objects, and processes, and the question of which things and processes have the power to act. We welcome papers that focus on: conceptual and theoretical questions; theoretically informed empirical research; methodology; and political implications of nonhuman agency. Keywords: agency; more-than-human; posthuman; environmental politics This session is sponsored by the Cultural Geography Study Group. Please send your abstract to Charles Gillon ([log in to unmask]) by 28th March for consideration by the session organisers, and also submit your abstract through the conference website when you register (http://iag-nzgs2014.org/).