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Dear colleagues,

we are happy to present our call for papers for the Global Conference on Economic Geography (GCEG) in Cologne, Germany (July 24-28, 2018). Please feel invited to submit an abstract for presentation.

Best regards

Stefanie & Felix

Labour Geography and Capitalist Reproduction

More than 20 years ago, both mainstream as well as radical economic geography were profoundly criticized for their blindness to labour's geographic agency, reducing it to an economic factor or a passive object of capital's strategy (Herod 1997). Since then, a wide range of literature and case studies has demonstrated labour's active space, scale, and place making. However, there is also a serious critique on labour geography. This critique tackles a certain empiricism due to the prevalent theoretical disconnection of labour's resistance and social abilities with wider societal, political and economic structures (Peck 2003; Mitchell 2011; Coe 2012; Herod 2016). Hence, the need for further development of labour geography is obvious to strengthen its very impact.

In our session, we want to discuss consequences and further steps following this debate. Our guiding question is: How can labour be conceptualized as an active, intervening social agent, transforming social landscapes and society - without falling into the trap of an “agency-centred ontology” (Peck 2013)? Following this question we invite theoretical as well as empirical contributions which could cover the following but also related issues:

• What is the relation between labour's spatial agency and the contemporary capitalist social formation?
• What kind of socio-spatial abilities and what kind of constraints do we observe on labour’s side, and how could we conceptualise them?
• In what manner is labour’s scale making important for the contemporary capitalist mode of production?
• How can we theorize conditions of labour's agency without falling back to take them as pure structural conditions, objectifying labour?

Applicants please submit abstracts until March 15, 2018 directly on the conference homepage:

https://www.gceg2018.com/call-for-sessions-and-papers.html.

For further questions please contact us:

Stefanie Hürtgen (Salzburg, AT)
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Felix Silomon-Pflug (Frankfurt, DE)
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References

• Coe, Neil M. (2012): Geographies of Production III: Making Space for Labor. In Progress in Human Geography 37 (2), pp. 271–284.
• Herod, Andrew (1997): From a Geography of Labor to a Labor Geography: Labor's Spatial Fix and the Geography of Capitalism. In Antipode 29 (1), pp. 1–31.
• Herod, Andrew (2016): Labour Geography: Where have We been? Where should We go? In Ann Cecilie Bergene, Sylvi B. Endresen, Hege Merete Knutsen (Eds.): Missing Links in Labour Geography. Oxon, New York: Routledge (The Dynamics of Economic Space), pp. 15–28.
• Mitchell, Don (2011): Labor's Geography. Capital, Violence, Guest Workers and the Post-World War II Landscape. In Antipode 43 (2), pp. 563–595.
• Peck, Jamie (2003): Labor Geographies. Workers and the Landscapes of Capitalism by Andrew Herod. Book Review. In Annals of the Association of American Geographers 93 (2), pp. 518–521.
• Peck, Jamie (2013): Making Space for Labour. In David Featherstone, Joe Painter, Doreen B. Massey (Eds.): Spatial Politics. Essays for Doreen Massey. Chichester, West Sussex: Wiley-Blackwell (RGS-IBG book series), pp. 99–114.