1st Call for Papers
Conference: RGS-IBG Annual Meeting, 31st August to 2nd September 2011, London.
Session: Experimental spaces
Organizers: Emma Roe (Southampton), Beth Greenhough (QMUL), Jamie Lorimer (KCL), Gail Davies (UCL)
Sponsors: History and Philosophy of Geography Research Group
Within geography experimentation has long been understood as a subject for analysis through its specific spaces of operation (Livingstone 2003). However, increasingly experimentation is being understood as a form of political and ethical intervention into relations and contexts which are uncertain, contingent and overspill laboratory spaces and settled subjectivities. In this session, we are interested in how geographies of experimentation and experimental geographies might be brought together through a focus on how relations between human and non-human beings and materials pattern more extensive and emerging landscapes of experimental spaces. Drawing on perspectives from Science and Technology Studies and Non-Representational Theory, we might question how practising experimentation (both within and beyond the laboratory) entails the development of new kinds of imaginaries, skills, practices, and modes of relating (Andersen and Harrison 2010; McCormack 2010) which articulate experimental encounters between humans and non-human animals (Despret 2004; Haraway 2008) and other kinds of matter (Stengers 2007). Equally, we might explore how experimental spaces are implicated in redefining new modes of political and ethical engagement. Recent work both within geography (Whatmore 2002; Bingham 2006; Hinchliffe et al 2005; Davies 2010; Lorimer 2010; Greenhough and Roe forthcoming), and beyond (Connelly 2008; Bennett 2010), has highlighted how articulating experimental spaces and relations between human and non-human beings is central to re-thinking who and what comes to matter politically and ethically.
This session asks:
How are experimental spaces inhabited in ways that allow human and non-human (animal, fossil, vital) constituents to co-exist, generating knowledges, practices and geographies? What happens when these relationships fail?
How does understanding experimental space as defined through relationships challenge more conventional ways of imagining experimental space as the ideal laboratory defined/confined by formal codes of practice? To what extent is experimentation no longer the exclusive preserve of traditional scientific expertise and localities?
How are/can experimental spaces performed through human-non-human relations be mobilised to generate novel ethical and political affects?
We welcome papers on topics such as, but not limited to,:
- Spaces of experimentation – the laboratory, field, social intervention, hospital etc.
- Experimental subjects and subjectivities (human, non-human, material)
- Experimental partnerships
- Experimental skills and practices
- Geographies of science
- Geographies of experimental regulation
- Experimentation beyond the laboratory
- Reterritorialising and deterritorialising spaces of experimentation.
- The history, politics and ethics of experimentation
Interested authors please contact any one of the session organisers (Beth Greenhough [log in to unmask], Emma Roe [log in to unmask], Gail Davies [log in to unmask], and Jamie Lorimer [log in to unmask]) with a 250 word abstract by Friday 11th February 2011.
References
Andersen B and Harrison P (2010) The promise of non-representational theories Taking-Place: Non-representational Theories and Geography (Farnham, Ashgate): 1-34
Bennett J (2010) Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham NC, Duke University Press)
Bingham N (2006) Bees, butterflies, and bacteria: Biotechnology and the politics of nonhuman friendship Environment and Planning A 38 483-498
Connelly W (2008) Capitalism and Christianity, American style (Durham NC, Duke University Press)
Davies G (2010) Editorial: Where do experiments end? Geoforum 41, 5: 667-670
Despret V (2004) The Body We Care for: Figures of Anthropo-zoo-genesis Body & Society 10 (2-3) 111-134
Greenhough B and Roe E (forthcoming) Ethics, space and somatic sensibilities: comparing relationships between scientific researchers and their human and animal experimental subjects Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 28: 43-45.
Haraway D (2008) When species meet (University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis)
Hinchliffe S, Kearnes M B, Degen M, Whatmore S (2005) Urban wild things: a cosmopolitical experiment Environment and Planning D-Society & Space 23 643-658
Livingstone D (2003) Putting science in its place: geographies of scientific knowledge (Chicago, Chicago University Press)
Lorimer J (2010) Elephants as companion species: the lively biogeographies of Asian elephant conservation in Sri Lanka Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 35 491-506
McCormack D (2010) Thinking in Translation: The affirmative refrain of experience/experiment Taking-Place: Non-representational Theories and Geography (Farnham, Ashgate): 201-220
Stengers I (1997) Power and Invention (University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis)
Whatmore S (2002) Hybrid Geographies. Natures, Cultures and Spaces (London, Sage)
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