P19: Geography, empires, nations and the role of geographical societies
Organisers:
Session Outline:
We invite papers from researchers interested in how geographical societies in the past have offered not only their services and expertise, but also their maps and databases in order to further the national and imperial goals of different European states. Of particular interest are papers that explore the various ways in which geographical societies and their members were involved in war efforts, peace preparations, and the production of nationalist and imperialist propaganda.
P58: Urban political economies of Eastern Europe from a global perspective
Session Outline:
Despite convergences between urban geographies of neoliberal capitalism, global urban change is highly uneven, developing along divergent paths. This session proposes to analyse recent Eastern European urban trends, including growing social inequalities within and between cities, a critical understanding of processes of decision-making and urban diversity management, and policy networks of inter-city competition and branding in a political economic approach. The venue of the EUGEO conference in post-socialist Budapest offers us a good opportunity to reflect upon the previous decades of neoliberal capitalism in Eastern European urban development within global processes and planetary urbanization (Brenner and Schmid 2012). We also propose to look at how critical urban studies can offer theoretical and methodological tools to understand and challenge urban power relations.
We invite both conceptual and empirical papers addressing – but not limited to – the following questions:
- How might a comparative and historical understanding of global urbanism help us decipher and eventually counteract current political economies in Eastern European cities?
- To what extent can the notions of urban neoliberalism, urban entrepreneurialism and urban growth coalitions be applied to Eastern European cities?
- What are the emerging spatial manifestations of uneven power relations and social struggles in Eastern European cities from a global perspective?
- What are the roles of trans-scalar governmentality (Majoor and Salet 2008) and supra-national institutions (such as the EU) in Eastern European regimes of accumulation?
- What is the role of critical urban studies at the intersections of policy-making, academia and activism in different geographical contexts?
P17: Geographies of nature – understanding, sense making, knowledge making
Organisers:
Session Outline:
Scientific research concerning nature–human relationship is a recurrent theme in the last few decades among many disciplines, producing various critical reflections and heated debates. Geographers have emphasized that our understanding of nature as a resource or as a physical phenomenon is excessively narrow, while environmental studies provide a promising interdisciplinary platform for connecting natural and social scientists. How our natural environment is socially constructed and locally perceived? What are the viable strategies for environmental resilience on different interconnected scales (local, regional, global)? How should we critically understand environmental governance in the reproduction of inequalities? This session invites papers dealing with various connecting questions, including the historically changing social constructions and representations of nature, the cultural and political roles of public attitudes towards the natural environment, the moral challenges of environmental conflicts, security and justice, the changing possibilities for environmental activism and grassroots movements, and the sustainable strategies of local cultures to resilience. Critical studies are also invited focusing on the shifting political economies of environmental governance and policy-making, nature-capital relations and the role of the social production of nature in reproducing social inequalities and underdevelopment, the financialization or commodication of nature (e.g. land grabs) under ecological regimes generating environmental crises, and recent controversies in environmental knowledge production (e.g. climate change).
