Apologies for cross-postings
Association of American Geographers Annual Meeting, 22-27 April 2009,
Las Vegas, Nevada
Gendered (im)mobilities of knowledge and learning in the new economy
Organisers:
Sarah Hall, School of Geography, University of Nottingham
Al James, Department of Geography, Queen Mary, University of London
Session sponsored by the AAG’s ‘Economic Geography (EGSG)’ and
‘Geographical Perspectives on Women (GPOW)’ specialty groups
In contemporary ‘knowledge based economies’, the capacities of firms,
regions and nations to foster and support interactive processes of
knowledge production, innovation and learning have been identified as
key sources of sustainable competitive advantage. However, in contrast
to earlier rather esoteric notions of learning and innovation as
residing ‘in the air’ or in the ‘buzz of urban life’, recent research
has emphasized the ways in which processes of knowledge transfer and
learning are fundamentally embodied. Importantly, this work points to
the always and everywhere ‘peopled’ nature of learning and knowledge
circulation as everyday activities that (re)produce relational networks
of knowledge transfer, translation and recombination. Problematically
however, the vast majority of insights within the geographical learning
and innovation literature to date have come predominantly from
explorations of male worker mobility, or else from analyses which simply
do not distinguish between female and male workers at all. Relatively
little attention has been paid to the gendered identities,
responsibilities, commitments and interests of mobile (and less mobile)
workers beyond the workplace. As such, relatively little is known about
how the wider social reproductive relations in which male and female
knowledge workers are embedded shape their participation (and
non-participation) in relational networks and communities of practice
that enable learning in different spaces and with different degrees of
geographical reach. Overall, there remains considerable scope for
geographers to develop more fully analyses of the gendering of learning
and knowledge (re)production in contemporary space economies.
The aim of this session, therefore, is to connect new insights from the
geographies of knowledge and learning literatures with geographical
analyses of gender divisions of work, time, employment, and care in the
new economy. Our concern is to move away from narrow economistic
conceptions of learning and knowledge spillovers through worker mobility
to embrace a broader social and emotional conception of knowledge
workers as women and men with a diverse range of family and care
responsibilities; and for many of whom, the dominant economistic
assumption of mobility as always and everywhere a good thing is
questionable, given its potentially disruptive effects on established
family routines and support structures, for example. The session seeks
to bring together established and junior scholars with research
interests in geographies of gender and learning to engage with one
another's work around instances of learning through doing (communities
of practice, secondments etc) and / or learning in 'classrooms' broadly
conceived (business schools, specialist training courses etc). Specific
topics might include, but are by no means limited to:
• The changing scales, depth and duration of knowledge workers’
movements ranging from migration, expatriation, short business trips and
the different consequences of these for individuals.
• How gendered patterns of labour churning vary between different
industrial sectors, and within that between different occupations, in
different geographical contexts.
• The ways in which workers’ mobility pathways (and hence patterns of
tacit knowledge sharing) are shaped by the differential provision of
work-life ‘balance’ arrangements by knowledge-intensive firms.
• Liminality and the tensions between individual career and other life
aspirations versus corporate aims of business competitiveness.
• The differential challenges facing individuals in combining different
learning spaces and activities (e.g. formal education, professional
development, situated learning) throughout the career life-course.
• The significance of female-dedicated ‘labour market intermediaries’ in
overcoming gender inequalities in learning through social network
building and sharing of expertise, skills and knowledge in support of
regional, occupationally-based, cross-firm learning communities.
• The methodological and political implications of foregrounding
questions of gender in work on mobility, learning and knowledge circulation.
Please send expressions of interest and abstracts to Sarah Hall
([log in to unmask]) and Al James ([log in to unmask]) by
Wednesday 8 October 2008
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