RGS-IBG Annual Conference, Manchester: 26-28 August 2009

Call for papers

Geographies of the seasons 

Session organisers: Russell Hitchings (UCL) and Rosie Day (University of 
Birmingham)

Geographers have yet to explore fully the changing ways in which societies 
relate to the seasons. This is somewhat surprising when research on 
seasonality has the potential to shape an important and contextually sensitive 
approach to the ways in which people live with the climate. Indeed an 
exploration of seasons might serve as something of a touchstone in terms of 
how people relate to climate today and how they might come to live with 
climates of the future. Across the western world many lifestyles are becoming 
deseasonal as people choose to spend more and more of their time indoors 
within air conditioned environments. Yet some argue the effects of seasons 
are increasingly important as higher summer temperatures make particular 
forms of mortality and morbidity more common during this time. There are also 
concerns about winter with regard to how various groups cope with cold and 
how they could pass through this time more effectively. Meanwhile a variety of 
public promotions encourage us to link our lives more closely to the seasons. 
Sustainability agendas sometimes promote seasonally attuned living as a 
means of achieving a more authentically local form of existence in terms of 
food consumption and other activities. Yet commercial interests regarding 
clothing and lifestyles use the same strategy to sell products and services we 
might not otherwise want or need. There are many reasons why we might be 
interested in seasons. 

Cultural historians have occasionally speculated about the dwindling degrees of 
seasonal experience associated with the human migration to cities. Stehr 
(1997) contends that an increasingly indoor urban existence may bring an 
increased fascination with weather and catastrophic climate events. Kammen 
(2004) argues that the resulting uniformity of experience breeds the desire for 
seasonal symbolism as a means of coming to terms with our corporeal 
existence. The argument sustaining this proposed session is that, in order to 
move beyond speculation, we should examine how social relations with the 
seasons are organised and represented both today and in the past and in 
various societies across the globe. This session will therefore provide a forum 
for geographers and others interested in the seasons to come together. This is 
a potentially important research topic and it could usefully be enriched by a 
number of conceptual and empirical approaches at this stage. Our aim is to 
explore these issues and thereby initiate a new conversation about how an 
explicit focus on seasons could enrich various policy and academic agendas. 
Though we do not seek to limit the focus at this stage, possible papers might:

1.	explore how a focus on the seasons might enrich and develop 
established interests in climate change and processes of adaptation to climate 
change 

2.	discuss the ways in which geographers have examined the seasons in 
the past and how they are represented within wider society today

3.	conceptualise how the seasons should be understood according to 
the materiality associated with their experience in terms of weather and other 
encounters

4.	provide empirical cases of how particular groups manage their 
seasonal experience, how they have done so in the past, and how they could 
be encouraged to do so better

5.	think about how a focus upon seasons might advance our 
understanding of nature and how its particular component parts can be 
accounted for

6.	explore the season as a particular form of experienced rhythm that 
necessarily intersects with a variety of other social temporalities

7.	consider seasonality in terms of how it is marketed and practised 
within processes of food production, fashion retailing and other businesses

8.	reflect on the policy potential of research work explicitly concerned 
with seasonal change in contemporary society

Titles and abstracts (200 words) should be emailed to Russell 
([log in to unmask]) by Friday 23 January 2009. We would also welcome 
initial expressions of interest and ideas, so feel free to get in touch.