- - - Apologies for cross-posting! - - -
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)
([log in to unmask])
Felix Silomon-Pflug (Frankfurt, DE)
([log in to unmask])
*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.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
*Dr. Felix Silomon-Pflug*
Assistant Researcher
Goethe University
Department of Human Geography
Theodor-W.-Adorno-Platz 6
60629 Frankfurt/Main
Germany
Tel.: +49 (0)69 798 35183
Mail: [log in to unmask]
GPG Key-ID: 0xE6349DC3
Web: www.humangeographie.de/silomon
