Call for Papers
7th International Urban Geographies of Post-Socialist States Conference (CATference)
Kyiv & Dnipro, Ukraine, 26 – 29 September 2017 (Conference webpage:
www.geokyiv.org/conferences/
Theorising cities from the Global East
Session Organiser: Martin Müller (University of
Zürich)
This session aims to investigate
one simple but important question: What, if anything, do cities in the Global
East have to contribute to global urban studies? If cities in other parts of
the world were crucial to thinking informality, postcolonialism, resistance and
neoliberalism – what, if anything, would cities in the former socialist
countries in Eastern Europe and Eurasia be paradigmatic for?
For answering this question, this session proposes to work around the notion of the Global East: the collective experience of former socialist societies that so often gets erased, sidelined, overlooked when carving the world up into Global North and South, as urban scholars have tended to do. Instead of considering cities in the Global East as cases for the mere application of existing theories, this session seeks contributions that recover the Global East and its distinctiveness for global urban scholarship. It aims to take a step towards theorising from the Global East.
Contributions could
consider the Global East as suspended between globalising processes and the
legacies of multiple transformations from tsarism to communism to neoliberalism
and neopatrimonialism. They could focus on the promiscuous mélange and superimposition of various political economies,
architectural styles, urban policies and social practices. They could examine
cities in the Global East as part of global flows of knowledge, policies,
capital, ideas and people. They could unravel the multiple overlapping
spatialities and temporalities that mark cities in the Global East. They could
do many other things.
Whatever the exact focus of your proposed paper, it should feature a clear orientation towards distilling the distinctiveness of situated theorising from the Global East in a world of cities.
Submission Process
If you are interested in participating in this session, please submit an abstract of no more than 200 words to Martin Müller ([log in to unmask]) by 11 April 2017. Authors of selected papers will be notified by 13 April 2017.
******************** Prof. Dr. Martin Müller Swiss National Science Foundation Professor Geographisches Institut | Universität Zürich Winterthurerstr. 190 | 8057 Zürich | SWITZERLAND N 47.3967 | E 8.5493 (498m ü. M.) Phone +41 44 635 52 47 [log in to unmask] www.martin-muller.net ********************