We’re organising a session on ‘Contemporary Elites and Global Inequalities’ at the Royal Geographical Society (RGS-IBG) Annual Conference 1-4 Sept 2020.
*Deadline for abstracts January 31st 2020*
The session will focus on economic elites as a way of studying power and inequality from above (Serafini and Smith Maguire, 2019 p. 4). In a context of intensifying concentrations of wealth and income among the ‘0.1%’, this session examines long-term and
newly emerging tensions within and between categories of wealth and elites.
First, this session seeks to generate critical reflection on the raced, gendered and post/colonial aspects of elite formations and global inequalities. What are the racial geographies of affluence? What is the role of gender in wealth accumulation and
elite social reproduction? What are the colonial and imperial continuities in elite formations? Second, the session aims to complicate and historicise our understandings of monied elites and global inequalities. In contrast to assumptions of the (hyper-)agency
of wealth elites, it asks how different social structures produce different elites, at a variety of scales both local and global. What are the wider circuits of intermediaries and infrastructures which enable them? Third, aside from the frequent use of Bourdieu,
what alternative theoretical frameworks allow us to engage with how elite power is contingently realised. This session welcomes research which questions how power and capital is accumulated, dispersed and reproduced through historically and geographically
specific cultural processes (Yanagisako, 2002).
We welcome submissions that explore the geographies of elites in a range of global contexts, at a variety of scales and through diverse theoretical frameworks.
If this sounds of interest to you, please send a title, your name, affiliation and an abstract of max. 200 words to the session organisers: Katie Higgins [[log in to unmask]] and Laura Clancy [[log in to unmask]] by 31st January 2020.
Best wishes,
Laura & Katie