Invitation to submit an abstract for the 2017 Symposium

It is with great pleasure that we invite you to submit an abstract for our symposium Whose Land Is It Anyway, to be held at RMIT University Melbourne from the 14 - 16 November 2017. 

Questions of ownership, occupation, belonging, tenure, and rights in land profoundly structure the shape of cities, the lives of their citizens and the possibility for intervention in their development. Social relations in property and the distributional outcomes to which they give rise, are therefore highly consequential for the socio-ecological futures of cities.

Yet ‘property’ is too often considered in its most narrow form – as the private exchange rights that flow from individual ownership of land. This view makes invisible the diverse, plural and alternative relationships to place – that we might call ‘property’ – everyday in contemporary cities.

This symposium will bring together researchers, communities and practitioners to discuss how to rethink property and belonging in contemporary cities. Our purpose is to share diverse stories about everyday property practices in order to build better conceptual frameworks.

THEMES

We welcome papers that address the following kinds of themes and issues:

• Indigenous socio-cultural practices in cities
• Informal property practices
• Housing and squatting movements
• Anti-eviction and anti-gentrification movements that reorganise property relationships
• Place-based struggles 
• Alternative mapping practices and decolonizing research methodologies 
• The ethics and politics of making visible marginalised everyday property practices

Only a limited number of abstracts will be accepted so that the symposium can foster a genuine conversation among all participants. Abstracts will be assessed based on: strength and coherence of conceptual contribution toward understanding alternative property practices and quality of original case study, empirical material or narrative contribution.

Submissions will be considered in June and all decisions communicated by 20 June 2017 to corresponding authors.

Please submit your abstract via the conference's website online or via the button below. 

Deadline for abstracts is 31 May 2017.

HOST

The 2017 Symposium will be held at RMIT University in Melbourne by the Centre for Urban Research. The format will include plenaries, concurrent paper sessions, contributions from local Aboriginal Elders, and a field-trip. A symposium dinner and welcome reception will be part of the program.