RGS-IBG Annual International Conference 2017: London, 29th August - 1st September 2017
CFP – Geographies of mobility and creativity: impacts, identities and inequality
Convenors: Dr. Wen-I Lin (National Taipei University, Associate Prof.), Dr Justin Spinney (Cardiff University, Lecturer), Dr. Shu-Yi Chiu (National Taipei University, Assistant Prof.),
Mobility and Creativity are increasingly being promoted as policy solutions to many urban environmental and socio-economic problems (Spinney 2016, Lin & Chiu 2016). Certain forms, quantities and trajectories of mobility are idealised and normalised to enhance the identities and productivity of citizens, regions and nations in line with health and economic agendas. Similarly, agendas around creativity and innovation attempt to mobilise and reposition individuals, regions and nations to enhance productivity. In both instances, policy-makers seek to script and specify certain more desirable subjectivities and identities (for example the urban cyclist, electric car driver, craft entrepreneur, creative quarter, design capital) whilst marginalising others.
It is evident that creativity agendas are underpinned and enabled through the movement and mobilisation of resources, images and people at different scales. Similarly, urban mobility initiatives are seen to rely on innovation, entrepreneurship and creativity. Moreover, we are at a moment when mobility and creativity as ‘solutions’ are becoming rapidly globalised. However, whilst there is an emerging body of work dealing with the ways in which mobility fixes (Stehlin 2014, Spinney 2016) and urban creativity (Lin & Chiu 2014) manifest in specific locations, we have less understanding of the inter-dependence between concepts of mobility and creativity, and the ways in which such concepts travel between Global North and South, West and the East (Soderstrom 2013). This session seeks submissions that attempt to ‘decolonise’ these transfers by excavating and foregrounding the mechanisms, geographies and rationalities through which mobility and creativity intersect, circulate and manifest, and to report on the inequalities and geographies which such transfers are both productive of and rely upon.
This session seek contributions from scholars working in diverse disciplines engaging within and beyond the following themes:
• The role that mobility plays in producing the creative subject/ region/ nation, and the role that creativity and entrepreneurship play in producing the mobile subject/region/nation.
• Political and scientific rationalities underpinning mobility and creativity ‘fixes’ in different contexts – for example ecological modernisation, neoliberalism, modernity, development, empowerment.
• Governance of policy transfer between nations and regions in relation to mobility and creativity; examples of the range and nature of institutions and organisations acting within these fields.
• The role of objects, design and ‘things’ in making up the subject of creativity and/or mobility and its others.
• The new cultural and spatial geographies produced through mobility and creativity as solutions.
• Accounts of the spatial and subjective ‘others’ constructed by promoting the creative and mobile subject.
• Accounts of the impacts, mutation and contestation to creative and mobility fixes.
• Potential consequences of emerging nationalist political agendas on cross-border transfers.
• Methodological innovation in researching creative and mobile practices.
Please submit abstracts of no more than 250 words to all convenors by Friday 3rd February 2017. They can be contacted on the following email addresses: [log in to unmask]; [log in to unmask]; [log in to unmask]
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