~Not knowingly cross-posted but feel free to share and circulate~
Yet another call for papers for the RGS-IBG Conference, Kensington Gore, London, 27 to 30 August 2019
Geographies of the end of days
Sponsored by the Historical Geography Research Group
Ever since Geography attempted to fledge the imperial nest it has found validatory succour in self-made proclamations that as a discipline and as a set of practices it can be a force for good in the world: social justice, after Soja (2010), so often writ
as spatial justice; climate justice likewise neatly cleaved into the human-environment intellectual space that Geography calls its own. Such claims necessarily position Geography as a purposive and providential endeavour, a hopeful discipline, a means of salving
and perhaps even solving all that ills the world. Hope, of course, is important, not least in those moments of time when the world appears to be dissolving. But against such a progressive view (and vision) of hope, geographers (and other false prophets) have
been slower to embrace the lived importance of both conceptions of cataclysms to come and hopefulness for an end to the world and the making of worlds anew. Indeed, there is much which is hopeful in anticipating and wishing the end of days, this an expectation
of a collective eschatological salvation that anticipates either earth(l)y or other wordly utopias as a reward beyond.
While geographers have explored millennialism in recent US evangelicalism (Sturm and Dittmer, 2009; Dittmer and Spears, 2009), popular climate catastrophism (Swyngedouw, 2010, 2013; Strauss 2015), as well as apocalyptic imaginaries (Schlosser, 2015), the
geographies of the end of days have been remarkably little studied, the field all but left to historians (notably inspired by Harrison’s seminal
The Second Coming, 1979), theologians, sociologists and literary theorists. A session alone cannot redress this imbalance, for the project is far too big, too broad. Rather, it seeks to begin a process of taking the end of days seriously, of engaging
not just in earth writing but end of the earth writing.
Possible themes include, but are not necessarily limited to:
- Prophesying, mapping and writing the end of days
- Millennialism/millenarian/chiliastic geographies (e.g. in Islamic and Christian traditions as well as in
secular thought)
- Chiliasm as despair (after E.P. Thompson, 1963)/as a response to despair
- Chiliasm as disciplining device (and popular receptions/oppositions to thereof)
- Utopic afters
- Geographies beyond despair
- Hope in endings
If you would like to propose a paper for the session, please send an abstract of no more 200 words to Carl Griffin (
[log in to unmask]) by 8 February 2019.
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Professor Carl Griffin
Head of Department and Professor of Historical Geography,
Department of Geography,
University of Sussex
Falmer,
Brighton, BN1 9SJ
Tel: +44 (0)1273 877491
