CFP RGS-IBG Annual Conference, Exeter, September 2015
Session Title: The Ends of Geography’s Worlds
Sponsored by the History and Philosophy of Geography Research Group
Session convenor: Derek McCormack, School of Geography and Environment, University of Oxford
Abstract
What remains of world as a concept for geographical thinking? This session invites papers that address this question. Geographers and others have reflected frequently upon a range of disciplinary meta-concepts like region, territory, and place. These same concepts figure prominently in disciplinary dictionaries and encyclopedias. However, notwithstanding earlier work (e.g. Buttimer, 1976), there have been surprisingly few recent sustained engagements with world as concept for thinking and generating spacetimes (although see Harrison, 2007; Gibson-Graham, 2008; Wainwright, 2010; Shaw, 2010; Thrift, 2011, 2012). At the same time, beyond geography, the question of the value and significance of the concept of world has recently been posed in important and provocative ways by thinkers working in a range of philosophical traditions including post-structuralism (Gaston, 2013), speculative realism (Morton, 2013), and affect theory (Stewart, 2010, 2014). In such work, world is variously rejected as an outmoded concept inadequate to the task of grasping the post-phenomenological complexity of the ‘hyperobjects’ that distinguish life in the anthropocene (Morton), or carefully affirmed as a way of gathering the affective qualities of lived spacetimes (Stewart). In the context of these ongoing engagements, this session invites contributions that engage with the problems and promise of world as a concept for thinking spacetimes.
Potential contributions to this session might reflect upon a range of theoretical, methodological, and ethico-political issues, including, but not limited to the following:
• Different conceptualisations of worlds by a range of philosophers (e.g. Badiou, Derrida, Heidegger, Irigaray, Nancy, Sloterdijk)
• Relations/tensions between phenomenological and post-phenomenological understandings of worlds
• The import, promise, and failure of world as a concept for elaborating the geographies of different ethical and political formations
• Methodologies and approaches for making worlds explicit and/or for becoming attuned to their affective qualities and capacities
• Interventions, practices, and experiments that might make or remake worlds to different ends
Please send abstracts of no more than 200 words to [log in to unmask] by 10th February 2015
Works cited
Buttimer A 1976 Grasping the Dynamism of the Lifeworld, Annals of the Association of American Geographers 68 277-292
Gaston S 2013 The Concept of World from Kant to Derrida, London: Rowman Littlefield
Gibson-Graham J K 2008 Diverse economies: performative practices forother worlds, Progress in Human Geography 32 5 613-632
Harrison P 2007 Corporeal remains: Vulnerability, proximity, and living on at the end of the world, Environment and Planning A 40 423-445
Morton T 2013 Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press
Shaw I G R 2010 Sites, truths and the logics of worlds: Alain Badiou and human geography, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 35 431–442
Stewart K 2014 Road Registers, Cultural Geographies 21 549-563
Stewart K 2010 Afterword: Worlding Refrains, in M Gregg and G Seigworth eds The Affect Theory Reader, Durham NC: Duke University Press
Thrift N 2011 Lifeworld Inc—and what to do about it, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 29 5 – 26
Thrift N 2012 Peter Sloterdijk and the Philosopher’s Stone, in S Elden ed Sloterdijk Now, Cambridge: Polity 133-146
Wainwright J 2010 On Gramsci’s ‘conceptions of the world’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 35 507–521
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