Hi Jero
3 quick responses.
1. Ideas change the world. New ideas are, by definition, sometimes hard to
get one's head around. Experimentation in thought is not only justified but
essential. The issues you raise had to be ideas before they were issues
(sometimes ideas generated by intellectuals perhaps)
2. Debating a cfp yes - deriding them not so good (not that you done that).
3. (But) Is talking of "enemies" helpful and productive language? Maybe that
feels like (very) old and tired ideas?? The cfp might contain new ideas.
Cheers Owain
Dr Owain Jones
Reader in cultural geography: landscape, place and environment; Countryside
& Community Research Institute / Contact Details
Publications: Academia.edu/OwainJones
Associate Editor: Journal of Children’s Geographies
Committee: Royal Geographical Society Social and Cultural Geography
Research Group
Associate: Land2
Visiting Fellow: School of Arts and Social Sciences, Northumbria University
Sonic Severn
SevernEstuaryArtAtlas (SEAA)
skype - owainonskype Mobile: 07871 572969
Priston Festival
-----Original Message-----
From: A forum for critical and radical geographers
[mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Jeronimo Montero
bressan
Sent: 01 October 2012 22:14
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: FINAL CFP Will Power: creative ontologies for changing
difference
CPFs like this one make me angry.
What my colleagues do and say strongly influences the importance of
Geography for the society and for our colleagues in other disciplines. As
such, I claim my right to get angry at someone who, I think, practices the
diversion of intellectual geography (with public money).
Unemployment, human trafficking, slavery, hunger, war, displacement,
privatisation of resources etc are on the rise. And they are on the rise
EVERYWHERE in the world, perhaps as never before. Geographers have a lot to
say about these and other problems affecting the majorities in the world,
but only the minority of us is doing so! I know it’s difficult to say that
research must be useful, because today the meaning of useful is set by
research funding boards that lack transparency. But I do think that
geographers should think of those who pay for their salaries, instead of
looking at their own mental diversion.
In the end our personal histories explain, I guess, why we do what we do.
Some want to abstract from their middle-class past and/or present, being
more or less successful. Others are happy with it. Fair enough, but they are
political enemies for me, and I defend this and every forum as a place to
discuss this too.
Jero
---------------------------------------------------------
Dr Jerónimo Montero Bressán
ESRC Post Doctoral Fellow
School of Environment and Development
University of Manchester
Tel: +44 (0)161 275 8688
http://personalpages.manchester.ac.uk/staff/jeronimo.montero
Latin American Editor for Human Geography
www.hugeog.com
________________________________________
From: A forum for critical and radical geographers
[[log in to unmask]] on behalf of Krueger, Robert
[[log in to unmask]]
Sent: 01 October 2012 20:00
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: FINAL CFP Will Power: creative ontologies for changing
difference
Allen,
Had a medium existed years ago when you were doing your "critical" research
I imagine you'd have received some bullying emails like the ones you send
from time to time. While I imagine some space cadets might enjoy you
attempt at humor--especially those who say social theory is a 'speed bump'
in the history of geography (you know who you are)--we on crit geog, I dare
say, do not.
So, please, feel free to to write your obnoxious retorts, just don't send
them to this list.
Now, for those of you with a sense of humor. Here is a spoof cfp written,
but not sent, some years ago after Thompson died.
Gonzo Geographies
It's a little known fact that the bestselling geographer on Amazon.com is
gonzo journalist, philanthropist and general debaucherer Hunter S Thompson.
This session pays tribute to the spirit of the great man by examining
geographies of the mundane made surreal and surreal made mundane.
Geographers spend too much time talking about other people's practices and
not enough immersing themselves in the paranoia and strangeness of the
everyday. The timidness of polite ethnographic practice only serves to
highlight the hypocrisy of contemporary geography in its sham of openness
and deviance hidden behind tenure and the nightly retreat into middle class
domesticity.
The ethnographic pretence of washing dirty laundry in public must give way
to the willingness to run around naked covered in one's own excrement. We
demand an end to non-risky risk taking in the academy.
Content as intervention will be good. Formal presentations will not be
tolerated. Performances could last 15 minutes, but will be shorter, if
boring. In lieu of a PowerPoint, please bring one red, rubber nose.
Who's with us?
Rob Krueger
On 10/1/12 12:03 PM, "Allen J. Scott" <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> Is this another of those spoof CFPs?
>
>
>
>
>
>
> Quoting JD Dewsbury <[log in to unmask]>:
>
>> Final Call for papers with extended deadline until 8th October
>>
>> Annual Meeting of the Association of American Geographers, Los
>> Angeles CA, April 9-13, 2013
>>
>>
>>
>> Will Power: creative ontologies for changing difference
>>
>> Organisers: David Bissell, The Australian National University and J-D
>> Dewsbury, University of Bristol
>>
>>
>>
>> The will is a pervasive trope in debates on social transformation.
>> Political will, individual will, collective will, and free will are
>> frequently invoked as the necessary powers of sustenance that are
>> required in order to effect a transformation. The will has often been
>> assumed to be a requirement for a sovereign individual and
>> fundamentally linked to the question of freedom, where the conscious
>> volitional power of the mind is a higher capacity that bestows humans
>> with the freedom of being capable of regulating the volatile bodily
>> habits and desires necessary for a moral life. Yet this
>> still-pervasive enlightenment understanding of will overlooks its
>> complex genealogy in ontological thought, where different
>> mobilisations of the trope emphasise a different face of its torsion
>> of activity and passivity, where to will gestures towards an active
striving, whilst being willing designates a passive susceptibility.
>>
>>
>>
>> This session opens a space to explore what happens to the related yet
>> distinct concepts of will and wilfulness when they are refracted
>> through the lineage of thought that 'renaturalises' the body where
>> bodies are understood as part of a visceral, affective natural
>> ecology. Powerful challenges to commonplace understandings of willing
>> emerge, for example, in Spinoza's Ethics, where freedom is not
>> something that follows from the will, but is linked to the striving
>> of essences. The will for Spinoza is thereby dispersed into a
>> multitude of essences that strive to preserve and persevere.
>> Nietzsche too disrupts the notion of a sovereign wilfulness, where
>> will becomes the outcome of competing drives of compulsion, force,
>> pressure, resistance and motion rather than being an authentic
>> expression of conscious volition, signposting other distributed
>> collectives where will power is a much more emergent quality.
>> Pascal's wager to believe or not believe in something like God, and
>> James' consideration of the habits and factors of fear and hope,
>> prejudice and passion, in our will to believe, indicates that reason
>> cannot always provide us with answers, so do we will some answers
>> over others; and from whence does that wilfulness come? The fickle,
>> distributed teleologies of will are a central part of Foucault's
>> theorisation of techniques of the self, expressed in terms of
>> practices of self-stylised care to effect transformations to thought
>> and action. Yet the freedoms that will affords the self to go beyond
>> the self might be challenged by the forces that constitute illness,
obsession, neurosis, when we are supposedly held 'against our will',
indicating a sustenance and resilience that is in jeopardy.
>>
>>
>>
>> In the face of multiple pressing problems within different ecological
>> spheres, the development of a radically rematerialised politics that
>> is faithful to the body's material and affective constitution has
>> become a vital way of carving out new understandings of social
>> transformation that are attentive to the complex, distributed
arrangements of force and matter.
>> Against this theoretical backdrop, in this session we want to open up
>> a space for thinking about the creative possibilities of attending to
>> the notion of wilfulness as a way of generating sites of material
>> transformation, where wilfulness is thus articulated as an audacious
>> and creative performative constituted by standing against the status quo.
>> Refracting the concept of will through these channels invites us to
>> explore the complex foldings of thought and matter that take place
>> through willing; where manifestations of will in desires, plans,
>> aspirations and projects become a key site of ethical concern through
>> the way that they must negotiate and be responsive to the virtuality
>> and immanence of will, through the nurturing and struggling with
potentials and incipiencies.
>>
>>
>>
>> As such, we invite both theoretical and empirically-focused papers
>> which relate to these themes and help to address the following questions:
>>
>>
>>
>> Concepts of will: How might 'will' be conceptualised in more
>> disruptive, antagonistic ways? How might will and wilfulness as a
>> locus of questioning and concern allow us to develop ontologies that
>> help to change difference, rather than simply endure it? In relation
>> to contemporary science, should we be developing a new ontological
>> approach to the concept of will, one that incorporates all existence
>> bringing together the evidencing of the empirical, the agency of the
>> material, the framing of the social, and the spectrum of animal and
thinking beings?
>>
>>
>>
>> Matters of will: How is the notion of a sovereign will destabilised
>> by theories that show that matter and thought are folded in ways in
>> which it is clear that no individual entity possesses free will? How
>> might a conceptual materialisation of the will force us to redraw our
>> commonplace notions of sustainability and resilience, so central to
>> current debates on ecological transformation? And how might a more
>> visceral, immaterial understanding of will change our understanding of
responsibility?
>>
>>
>>
>> Techniques of will: How might we think of will and wilfulness as both
>> torsions and transitions of preservation and destruction,
>> transformation and retention that carve out and expose a more radical
>> ethics of the body? What kinds of practices, mental technologies and
>> subconscious screens are rewiring, enacting and making manifest new
>> personal and social modes of wilfulness? How do our personal
>> understandings of the relationship of the will to the self help us to
prepare for the events of existence?
>>
>>
>>
>> Politics of will: How does thinking through wilfulness as a
>> performative act standing against the collective will of cultural,
>> political and ethical normalisation assist us in apprehending more
>> impactful applications of the micro political? How might new
>> collective struggles generate new modes of willing as we work with
>> and through others who share our seemingly wilful acts against the status
quo and thus our points of alienation?
>>
>>
>>
>> Please send an abstract (max 250 words) of your paper and expressions
>> of interest to David Bissell ( <mailto:[log in to unmask]>
>> [log in to unmask]) and J-D Dewsbury (
>> <mailto:[log in to unmask]> [log in to unmask]).
>>
>>
>>
>> We'd be very grateful if you could submit abstracts to us by 8th
>> October so that we have time to get the session organised!
>>
>>
>>
>>
>
>
>
> Allen J. Scott,
> Professor Emeritus,
> University of California - Los Angeles.
>
> http://elgarblog.wordpress.com/2012/09/06/a-world-in-emergence-cities-
> and-regi ons-in-the-21st-century-by-allen-j-scott/
>
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