Call for papers, American Association of Geographers 2017 Meeting, Boston, MA, April 5-9, 2017
Toward New Geographies of the Rural Global South
Session Organizers: Ryan J Stock (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign) and Pronoy Rai (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign)
Discussant: William G. Moseley, Professor of Geography & Director of African Studies, Macalester College
Sponsored by: Development Geographies Specialty Group, Cultural and Political Ecology Specialty Group, and Rural Geography Specialty Group
This session seeks to interrogate the entanglements and interstices of power that transform rural geographies and reproduce intersectional difference in the Global South. We propose to bring together research to advance our understanding of continuities and transformations of rural spaces in the context of the Anthropocene through multiple epistemologies and methodologies.
Recent research in the rural developing world has challenged academics to question the longstanding connections between agriculture and land tenure, with well-being of smallholder farmers and landless laborers (Rigg 2006); deepen our understanding of globalization as rural areas globally are being produced through suburban development caused by elite retreat to these areas (McCarthy, 2007), of spatial differentiation in the experiences of climate change and food insecurity and the politics of contestation over ecological resources (Woods, 2012), and of how class and identity constitute and are constituted by the social movements that are steered by the rural subaltern to confront land grabbing in the global South (Hall et.al, 2015); and bring into the realm of analysis embodied practices of work and care as these map on to the rigidities of rural masculinity and femininity to (re)produce heteronormative rural space (Little and Leyshon, 2003).
Patriarchal relations of production differentially situates rural women to respond to and cope with socioecological change (Sultana 2014). Essentializing discourses of "agrarian crisis" or "rural resurgence" ignore the political economic structures that reconfigure the gender divisions of rural livelihoods, as the work itself becomes more precarious (Ramamurthy 2014). Further, technologies of agricultural modernization alienate resources away from marginalized populations to new sites of capital accumulation (Birkenholtz 2016). In the context of anthropogenic climate change, development practitioners are haunted by "surprise" failures and "maladaptive" outcomes of projects targeting climate change vulnerability, representative of epistemological blind spots informed by uncritical binaries of social difference (Carr and Thompson, 2014). Multiscalar institutions mobilize apocalyptic discourses within a post-political social milieu (Swyngedouw, 2010), thereby naturalizing the neoliberal solutions of (debt)velopment that foreclose revolutionary transformation (Casolo and Doshi, 2013) and new carbon economies (Boyd, Boykoff and Newell, 2011) as repertoires of dispossession through "accumulation by decarbonization" (Bumpus and Liverman, 2008).
Intersectional social inequalities are resilient because of the ways in which material and semiotic boundaries are represented (Nightingale, 2011) by scholars and practitioners alike. Therefore, this session seeks to expand the horizons of methodology and praxis in the field of critical human geography. We invite scholars to draw on these and other vast bodies of research in development geography, agrarian studies, and political ecology to examine, among other things:
* How are new strategies of accumulation by the state and transnational corporations in rural areas of the global South impacting on existing agrarian class relations?
* What are the new forms of governmentalities being produced in the rural global South as rural populations and the state are increasingly becoming entwined in relations of struggle and cooperation?
* What are the mechanisms by which sustainable development policies and interventions reproduce social power and social difference?
* How do we understand the production of space in the rural context as smallholder farmers and landless laborers migrate to cities and to other productive rural areas, and new social relations and relations of production are engendered in the home villages of the migrants?
* How do we navigate the ethical and emotional challenges associated with doing qualitative research among poor rural populations in order to enhance the transformative potential of our research for the marginalized populations?
In this session, we invite papers that trace the contours of social power and a broadly defined political economy, offering "chains of explanation" (Blaikie and Brookfield, 1987) for the ever-widening axes of difference spatialized in rural areas. Moreover, we challenge participating scholars of the aforementioned rural transformations to theorize equitable political-economic transformations (O'Brien, 2012). This session seeks to advance scholarship that privileges the "partial perspective" (Haraway, 1988) of critically-defensible methodology that lends itself to emancipatory praxis.
Please send paper titles, abstracts (250 words) and Presenter Identification Number (PIN) to Ryan J Stock ([log in to unmask]) or Pronoy Rai ([log in to unmask]) by October 20. We will notify participants by October 23. Authors need to submit paper abstract first through the AAG website to obtain the PIN. Guidelines for preparing abstracts are available at: http://www.aag.org/cs/annualmeeting/call_for_papers/abstract_guidelines
References:
Birkenholtz, T. (2016). Dispossessing irrigators: water grabbing, supply-side growth and farmer resistance in India. Geoforum 69, 94-105.
Blaikie, P. & Brookfield, H. (1987). Land Degradation and Society. London: Metheun.
Boyd, E., Boykoff, M., & Newell, P. (2011). The "new" carbon economy: what's new? Antipode 43(3), 601-611.
Bumpus, A., & Liverman, D. (2008). Accumulation by decarbonization and the governance of carbon offsets. Economic Geography, 84(2), 127-155.
Carr, E.R., & Thompson, M.C. (2014). Gender and climate change adaptation in agrarian settings: current thinking, new directions, and research frontiers. Geography Compass, 8(3), 182-197.
Casolo, J., & Doshi, S. (2013). Domesticated dispossessions: towards a transnational feminist geopolitics of development. Geopolitics, 18(4), 800-834.
Hall, R., Edelman, M., Borras Jr, S. M., Scoones, I., White, B., & Wolford, W. (2015). Resistance, acquiescence or incorporation? An introduction to land grabbing and political reactions 'from below'. Journal of Peasant
Studies, 42(3-4), 467-488.
Haraway, D. (1988). Situated knowledges: the science of question in feminism and the privilege of partial perspective. Feminist Studies, 14(3), 575-599.
Little, J., & Leyshon, M. (2003). Embodied rural geographies: developing research agendas. Progress in Human Geography, 27(3), 257-272.McCarthy, J. (2007). Rural geography: Globalizing the countryside. Progress in Human Geography.
McCarthy, J. (2007). Rural geography: Globalizing the countryside. Progress in Human Geography.Nightingale, A. (2011). Bounding difference: intersectionality and the material production of gender,
Nightingale, A. (2011). Bounding difference: intersectionality and the material production of gender, caste, class and environment in Nepal. Geoforum 42, 153-162.
O'Brien, K. (2012). Global environmental change II: from adaptation to deliberate transformation. Progress in Human Geography 36(12), 667-676.
Ramamurthy, P. (2014). A feminist commodity chain analysis of rural transformation in contemporary India. In Routledge Handbook of Gender in South Asia, edited by Leela Fernandes. London and New York: Routledge,
247-259.
Rigg, J. (2006). Land, farming, livelihoods, and poverty: rethinking the links in the rural South. World Development, 34(1), 180-202.
Sultana, F. (2014). Gendering climate change: geographical insights. Professional Geographer 66(3), 372-381.
Swyngedouw, E. (2010). Apocalypse forever? post-political populism and the spectre of climate change. Theory, Culture & Society 27(2-3): 213-232.
Woods, M. (2012). Rural geography III: Rural futures and the future of rural geography. Progress in Human Geography, 36(1), 125-134
Pronoy Rai
Joseph and Marion Russell Fellow & PhD candidate (geography)
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Webpage: https://www.geog.illinois.edu/people/prai2
