Dear all, please see a very late call for papers for the upcoming RGS conference (30th August-2nd September). Replies needed ASAP. Please circulate to people you think would be interested.
Many thanks,
Harry & Chris
Youth and Urban Marginality: Conceptualizing a life on the margins
Session organisers:
Harry Pettit, London School of Economics: [log in to unmask]
Chris Suckling, London School of Economics: [log in to unmask]
This panel proposes the development of new perspectives within Geography on the production and constitution of life on the margins. From refugees, to slum dwellers, to the precariat marginality continues to provide an enticing avenue for conceptualizing the conditions of those who have been expelled from hegemonic, aspirational visions of urban living. However, some existing approaches fall into the trap of projecting marginal urban dwellers as simple dupes of domination, or romantically celebrate their ability to ‘cope with’ or ‘resist’ conditions of subordination. There is a need for a more theoretically rich debate within the discipline examining how those living on the margins – geographically, socially, economically, and culturally – firstly experience their condition of marginality, and secondly come to act within it so as to make their lives liveable.
Previous research has highlighted how life on the margins can be experienced through gendered, social, and temporal immobilities. At the same time, people actively respond to conditions of marginality through utilizing gendered, social, cultural, and moral discourses in order to accrue value in their lives, both in the present and in the imagined future. Youth have been a particular focus for research within this field; their stalled futures and unfulfilled aspirations representing a stark manifestation of emergent forms of urban inequality.
Various scholars have engaged the work of Pierre Bourdieu, along with his contemporaries, in order to conceptualize marginality as an urban condition (Loïc Wacquant; Paul Willis; Michael Burawoy). His sociological theory aids the understanding of how subordination is legitimized from the perspective of the marginalized. We are particularly interested in the complex processes through which misrecognition – still a rather elusive concept within sociological theory – is secured, and thereby the violent structures of inequality which produce marginal lives.
We invite empirically grounded approaches to conceptualizing the experience of and response to marginality from the perspective of those living it. We are particularly interested in questions of how marginality is produced and legitimated at different scales, through the interaction of structures of power with people living out their lives on the margins. We welcome studies on a broad range of experiences of marginality which engage these questions.
The session will take the form of paper presentations followed by discussion and commentary between the participants. Please would you send an abstract of no more than 250 words asap, but no later than the 16th February to both Harry ([log in to unmask]) and Chris ([log in to unmask]).
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