*Call for Papers: Association of American Geographers (AAG) Annual Meeting, 29 March – 2 April 2016, San Francisco*

Towards a theoretical ceasefire? Empirical inquiries into the making of urban injustices and conflicts

Organizers*

Malin Mc Glinn (Malmö University, Sweden)

Maria Persdotter (Malmö University, Sweden; Roskilde University, DK)

”The other day I had a daydream [in which I envisaged] not an end to theory — but rather a theoretical ceasefire to stay in effect until we know enough about what is actually going on in a large variety of different places. During the ceasefire, we will all be obligated to do intellectual work without using the following banned weapons: ’neoliberalism’, ’state’, ’bare life’, ’state of exception’, ’discipline’, ’governmentality’ and ’globalization’.”

- Mariana Valverde (2010, p.120)

As urban researchers committed to social justice and the democratization of democracy (see Dewey, 1927), how do we do research to further these objectives? One way to think about this question is to consider the political potential and ethical implications of research methodologies that affirm the importance of empirical inquiry over abstract theoretical critique. This session is intended to provide a forum for reflection on these issues as well as an opportunity to present ongoing work in the spirit of empirical inquiry. According to Farias (2011, p.366), inquiry is “a process that eventually involves a problematization of the real” and the goal for such an investigation is to make possible “the constitution and strenghtening of urban democratic politics” (p.372). In other words, we welcome papers that address the making of economic, political, and social injustices and conflicts.

Needless to say, the debate between empirically oriented and theoretically minded researchers has been a more or less permanent feature of urban studies. Much critical scholarship has been, and continues to be, partial to theoretical critique. However, this approach frequently assumes that social phenomena “proceed from the inner workings of abstractions” (Valverde, 2010, p.120) like ‘neoliberalism’ and ‘globalization’. As such, these are treated as coherent ideologies: pre-discursive monsters with evil plans to sacrifice all common good on the altar of capitalist interests. This theoretical approach is certainly not without merit. However, we suggest that the emphasis on critique often happens at the expense of detailed, empirical observation.

Conversely, it could be said that empirical inquiry lends itself to mere description, or worse, that it might succumb to what Sayer (1992, p.45) has termed “naïve objectivism” (see also Brenner et al, 2011, p.225). However, following Farias (2011, p.367) we argue that “inquiry is not at odds with critique, but only with a version of critique that is committed to theory rather than to the empirical.”

We welcome papers from various empirical sites that focus on how urban injustices and conflicts are brought into being.  Such papers could be engaged with questions of how urban poverty is governed, how financial subjects are made, or how processes of racialisation play out in the management of bodies. We also invite methodological reflections on the strength and weaknesses of empirical inquiry as a research approach.

Paper Submissions:

Please email abstracts of no more than 250 words to Maria Persdotter ([log in to unmask]) by Thursday 15th of October 2015. Successful applicants will be contacted by the 20th of October 2015 and will be expected to pay the registration fee and submit their abstracts online at the AAG website by October 29th 2015.

* The organizers are PhD students within the research environments ‘Migration, Urbanisation and Societal Change’ (MUSA) and ‘Critical Urban Sustainability Hub’ (CRUSH) at Malmö University, SE and Roskilde University, DK.

References:

Brenner, T., Madden, D. & Wachsmuth, D. (2011). Assemblage urbanism and the challenges of critical urban theory. City, 12(2), pp.225-240. 

Dewey, J. (1927). The public and its problems, New York

Farias, I. (2011). The politics of urban assemblages, City, 15(3-4), pp. 365-374.

Sayer, A. (1992). Method in Social Science: A Realist Approach, 2nd ed. London and New York, Routledge.

Valverde, M. (2010) Comment on Loic Wacquant's 'Theoretical Coda' to Punishing the Poor. Theoretical Criminology, 14(1), 117-120.