2nd Call for papers: Royal Geographical Soceity-IBG Annual Conference, London, 31st August-2nd September 2011 (Conference Theme: The Geographical Imagination)

Session title: Young people and alternative futures: imagining, hoping, transforming, persisting

Sponsored by the Geographies of Children, Youth and Families Research Group of the RGS-IBG.

Geographers have begun to consider how young people (transmigrants, homeless, queer, straight, other-abled, etcetera) may think or act politically, extending beyond familiar discussions of 'voice' and 'participation' (e.g. special issue of Area, 2010). Some of this work has focussed upon different kinds of hoping in which young people are (or are not) engaged (e.g. Kraftl, 2008; Pain et al., forthcoming). Other work has critiqued the modes of future-thinking or anticipation associated with young people (Evans, 2010; Evans and Colls, 2009). Still other work has critically engaged with what 'matters' to young people, in the context of their cultural practices and fashions (e.g. Horton, 2010; Soep & Chavéz, 2010).  Yet all of these suggest that making the world a more human dwelling place requires that our research and advocacy foster collective imagination among youth (Ginwright, 2008).  

This session seeks to extend debate about how young people live hope and engage politically in the spaces they populate. It also seeks to engage with youth studies scholars in other disciplines working around these debates. In particular, this session seeks papers that account for the diverse ways in which young people may be involved in imagining alternative futures, worlds or practices that may emerge from different, perhaps surprising, geographical, social, economic and cultural contexts. For example, the means, modes, and geographical spaces through which young people communicate are continually (re)imagined and changed.  These may involve diverse styles, emotions and technologies, some of which may be ostensibly hidden from adult view (Houchon, forthcoming). Thus, authors are encouraged to experiment with different modes of presentation that attend to the styles of imagination used by young people - for instance via Facebook, massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPG) like World of Warcraft, film, Web 2.0, Digital Mobile Technologies, youth-produced art, comics or zines, music, games, etcetera.  The practices of imagination and hoping may be more or less grand in scope. They may be more or less subversive, radical, resistant, autonomous or transformative (cf. Pickerill and Chatterton, 2006; Ginwright, Noguera, & Cammarota, 2006; Quijada, 2008).They may be more or less directed towards the achievement of 'real' social-spatial outcomes, whether distant or proximate. 

The session organisers would like to encourage authors working from various sub-disciplinary and theoretical backgrounds to submit papers that challenge and extend the ways in which we understand young people to 'be political'. Papers might address (but are not restricted to) the following questions:  

1.	How do young people live hope (imagining, transforming, resisting/persisting, and dreaming forward) in micro-geographical spaces or proto-autonomous zones (Kraftl, 2008) of their making? Consider, for instance: "Freegans" (Halpern, 2010) dedicated to salvaging what others waste and, when possible, living without the use of currency while squatting in an abandoned factory, a transnational space of youth dances (Ragland, 2003), screen-based youth productions, mobile websites and blogs, hip hop turntablists, queer youth radio, "shoes that cruise" or wheelie-shoes, (Applebury, 2010), zines, or even iPads and comics.

2.	How can young people use geographical spaces to "make the world wider", connecting across seeming boundaries (space-time, place, nation states, class, abelism, races, genders, languages, and cultures) while depending on one another's collective skills, perspectives and experiential knowledge in order to affect and be affected (Houchon, forthcoming; Malone & Hartung, 2010; Soep & Chávez , 2010; Vasudevan, 2010)?

3.	How do multi-modal sites of possibility make the possibilities of young people's participation (even those we haven't thought of) in academic debates more realizable? (Malone & Hartung, 2010; Vasudevan, 2010)?

4.	(How) can young people contribute to academic debates by unsettling the spacing of the academy in the present?

5.	How do differently-scaled relations and practices of power enable or constrain youth participating in academic debates (Ansell, 2009; Gallagher, 2008, Quijada, 2008)?

6.	How can young people's use of Web 2.0 and other Digital Mobile technologies be engaged in the production and presentation of academic knowledge (e.g. at this conference) and in the production of public geographies?

7.	How can young people and their academic allies better collaborate as they engage in future-thinking and imagination to create new spaces of hope (Akom, Cammarota, & Ginwright, 2008; Anderson, 2008; Ginwright, 2008; Quijada, 2008) that unsettles the spacing of the present and sustains valued ways of being?

Please submit abstracts of around 250 words to both Clotilde Houchon ([log in to unmask]) and Peter Kraftl ([log in to unmask]) by Friday, 11th February 2011. For more details about the conference, please see http://www.rgs.org/WhatsOn/ConferencesAndSeminars/Annual+International+Conference/AC2011.htm   



Dr Peter Kraftl
Senior Lecturer in Human Geography

Department of Geography,
University of Leicester,
University Road,
Leicester,
LE1 7RH

E-Mail: [log in to unmask]
Direct telephone: 0116 252 5242

View the Children's Geographies Journal at: http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals/titles/14733285.asp

Homepage: http://www.le.ac.uk/geography/staff/academic_kraftl.html

ESRC-funded research - "New Urbanisms, New Citizens: children and young people's everyday life and participation in sustainable communities" - www.go.warwick.ac.uk/nunc