RGS-IBG ANNUAL CONFERENCE, EXETER, 1-4 SEPT 2015

A session sponsored by the Social and Cultural Geographies Research Group, and convened by Paul Cloke (University of Exeter), David Conradson (University of Canterbury) and Graham Tobin (University of South Florida)

CALL FOR PAPERS: POST-DISASTER CULTURES

Attention to ideas of disaster, vulnerability and resilience has become increasingly prevalent in many contemporary human geographies. Far from being benign and neutral terms to describe socio-cultural consequences and responses to environmental events, these ideas are frequently used as tools of political subjectification, imposing often self-serving and neoliberalised rationalities onto particular assemblages of nature-society relations. As a result, recognition of, and making sense of, disasters and their aftermath often becomes shaped by particular political and technical imaginaries that co-opt the force of catastrophic events and limit orientations towards uncertainty, risk and the unknown. However, human geographers have recently made critical strides towards alternative narratives of disaster, prioritising accounts both of how disaster is lived and performed, and of how catastrophic events can be understood as affective landscapes in which social and cultural responses evade simple political-economic and representational explanations. This session on “post-disaster cultures” seeks to bring together geography researchers interested in how contexts of post-disaster shape and are shaped by these kinds of alternative social and cultural geographies.

We invite one or two more papers for this session, particularly from graduate students. Please contact one of the convenors if you are interested in participating in this session.

Many thanks!!