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Critical Spaces of Disaster Governance: risk, politics and avenues to transformation CfP for RGS-IBG Annual Conference, 28-31 Aug 2018 Session Convenor: Dr Sophie Blackburn, King’s College London Managing climate and disaster risk is a deeply political act with unequal social, spatial and temporal impacts. Relations that shape decision-making and action will also determine who carries the burden of impacts and the costs of absorbing losses, of adapting or of transforming (Pelling 2011). Understanding pre-existing politics of scale and power relations is therefore essential to better understand the legacies of adaptation decision-making on the fairness, equity and sustainability of development futures. The social (re)production of power through adaptation policy and action is recognised as important to understanding shifting outcomes, yet the adaptation literature has fallen short of exploring the relevance of social theory lenses to this question (Fazey et al. 2017). Given the burgeoning literature on transformational adaptation and ‘deliberate transformation’ (O'Brien 2012), greater critical engagement is needed with the power and politics which underlie such projects. This session builds on a similar one held at the RGS-IBG conference in 2015, which introduced a community of scholars working on critical approaches to risk governance. Three years later, this session seeks to highlight new innovations in the study of climate and disaster politics – with a focus on critical and interdisciplinary scholarship. It is hoped this engagement will culminate in a journal Special Issue. Theoretical and empirical papers are invited on the following themes: * locating sites of power and responsibility for shaping adaptive futures * understanding how risk is governed, in whose interests it is governed, and via what political processes * unpacking what sustainable and fair adaptation looks like; who are the winners and losers; what trade-offs are anticipated or acceptable * critical conceptual lenses to unpacking the political, ethical, cultural implications of adaptation * what constitutes transformation; what does it look like, can (or should) we pro-actively seek to induce ‘deliberate transformation’ * the relative role of the state, non-state actors and local people in risk reduction, adaptation and disaster response Please send abstracts of around 250 words to [log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]> by 10am Friday 16 February 2018. -------------------------------------------------------------------------- Dr. Sophie Blackburn Liberal Arts Early Career Development Fellow in Geography King's College London | Strand Campus | WC2R 2LS Office hours: 1-2 Weds and 1-2 Thurs (VWB 4.50) [log in to unmask] | @sophieblackburn http://kcl.academia.edu/SophieBlackburn --------------------------------------------------------------------------