Dear All
A last call for abstracts for our session on the Big Society at this RGS-IBG:
Call for Papers: RGS-IBG Annual Conference 2011 - Emerging geographies
of the Big Society
With apologies for cross-posting, colleagues are invited to submit
abstracts for
consideration for inclusion in a double session exploring the Emerging
Geographies of the Big Society at the 2011 RGS-IBG Annual Conference.
The session is sponsored by the Geography of Justice Working Group and
Political Geography Research Group, at the 2011 RGS-Annual Conference.
Deadline for Abstracts: FRIDAY 11TH FEBRUARY 2011
The 2011 conference will be held in London between 31 August and 2nd
September 2011.
EMERGING GEOGRAPHIES OF THE BIG SOCIETY
The Big Idea behind many policy initiatives emanating from new
Coalition government in the UK is ?The Big Society?. It is invoked to
justify an image of reconfigured state providing support for social
enterprise, mutalism and community organizing. The details of this
programme are still developing, but this programme will guide the
transformation of policy and practice in the UK over the coming years.
Many on the Left argue that the Big Society is little more than a
smokescreen, one which deploys the rhetoric of social enterprise,
mutualism and active citizenship to legitimate a further rolling back
of the state, cuts to public services, and an attack on workers and on
the local state. For many on the Right, including in the Tory party
itself, the concept seems vague and lacking in substance. In light of
the speed with which policy briefings emerge, the diversity of arenas
which will apparently be reconfigured by its approach (from schools,
to health services, to local policing, or the management of
public space and neighbourhood amenities), and the subjects and
organizations envisaged as central to its implementation (whether the
3rd sector, charities, public sector workers, social enterprises, or
?active citizens?), the Big Society seems a perfect example of policy
speed-up, rather than a coherent programme and philosophy waiting to
be implemented, the Big Society is best thought of as an emergent
project, articulated alongside other discourses (of fairness,
intergenerational justice, well-being, responsibility) and shaped by
the unstable politics of coalition formation and ongoing economic
crisis.
This session starts from the premise that the Big Society is more than
mere rhetoric, but is indicative of ongoing shifts and continuities in
the rationalities of public policy in the UK and beyond. The outcomes
of this programme as it develops and will be socially and
geographically uneven, as some communities are able to draw upon and
develop resources framed by models of social capital, active
citizenship, and voluntarism more than others.
As a political project still in the making, a thorough engagement with
the Big Society as both political philosophy and policy programme is
essential.
The session will be a preliminary attempt to think through the
implications of the Big Society. Potential foci for papers will include:
? The intellectual and political heritage of the Big Society (from
Putnam to Alinsky, Thatcher to Blair, Burke to Oakeshott);
? The conceptualizations of citizenship, responsibility, and civil
society in the Big Society;
? The understandings of the geographies of governance in the Big
Society, including localism, central-local state relations,
state-third sector relations, and de-centralisation;
? Considerations of the emergent geographies of the Big Society?s
impacts on public service provision, public sector employment, third
sector welfare organisations, and welfare recipients;
? The ambivalent spaces of political action that Big Society
initiatives create
(mutalism, grass roots activism, community organizing).
Format: A double, paper based session consisting of 2 x four 20 minute
papers to leave time for discussion.
Interested colleagues should submit an abstract of c200-250 words
together with the title of their proposed paper and the names and
affiliation of authors to Clive, Jon or Jane no later than FRIDAY 11TH
FEBRUARY 2011.
Clive Barnett, Open University, [log in to unmask]
Jon May, Queen Mary University of London, [log in to unmask]
Jane Wills, Queen Mary University of London, [log in to unmask]
Professor Jon May
http://www.geog.qmul.ac.uk/staff/mayj.html
Director of Graduate Studies
Editor (Social Geography) Geography Compass: http://www.blackwell-
compass.com/subject/geography/
Department of Geography
Queen Mary
University of London
Mile End Road
London E1 4NS
Tel: 0207 882 8925
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