Call for papers - RGS-IBG 2018: "Reclaiming failure in geography: academic honesty in a neoliberal world"
"Reclaiming failure in geography: academic honesty in a neoliberal world"
Session organisers: Thom Davies (University of Warwick), Tom Disney (University of Northumbria), and Elly Harrowell (Coventry University)
From fieldwork mistakes, to article rejections, to troubled pedagogical experiences, and missed academic opportunities; failure is everywhere within geography. So why is it a largely unspoken part of academic life? Despite our well-crafted resumes and polished publications, failure is a ubiquitous and unseen part of practicing the discipline of geography (Horton 2008). There have been some recent attempts to normalise failure in academia through ‘CVs of failure’ and theoretical explorations of the term (Halberstam 2011); but admissions of failure within our discipline remain rare, and the ‘toxic shame’ (Gill 2009) of failure can be professionally and emotionally debilitating for geographers at all career stages.
Failure can, however, be an emancipatory and powerful resource (Harrowell, Davies and Disney 2017). It can provide a means to resist the dominant neoliberal ideology that pervades the higher education system and demands “success” at all costs (Halberstam 2011). In an academic landscape that is increasingly measured and scrutinized through metrics or ‘REF outputs’, it has become increasingly difficult to talk about times and spaces where things go wrong. Yet there is so much to learn from these experiences. How do we as critical geographers reclaim failure? How can we incorporate failure into our everyday geographic practices in meaningful ways? Can failure become a means of doing geography better? Could honesty about failure be a means of resisting neoliberalism?
This session provides a safe place for speaking about failure. It invites papers that reflect openly and honestly about moments, feelings, experiences, senses, and spaces of failure within our discipline. Here we aim to reclaim failure. By facilitating an open discussion from a range of geographers at different career stages to reflect on how they have coped with, overcome and benefitted from failing in their career, the session will push back against the isolation created by the fear of failure. This session aims to cross the disciplinary divide within geography, drawing upon insights and vignettes from both physical and human geographers, to explore the diversity of experiences in the discipline.
We encourage both physical and human geographers to participate, and speakers are invited to present papers in (but not limited to) the following areas:
- Fieldwork failures;
- Identities and spaces of failure;
- Denied access to interviews, archives, or field sites
- Grant proposal failures
- Jobs missed
- Teaching gone-wrong
- Rejected publications
- ‘CVs of failure’
- Failing to perform the ‘productive academic’
Please submit abstracts (250 words max) and author details to Thom Davies ([log in to unmask]) or Elly Harrowell ([log in to unmask]) before the 1st Feb 2018.
References:
Gill, R., 2009. Breaking the silence: The hidden injuries of neo-liberal academia. Secrecy and silence in the research process: Feminist reflections, pp.228-244.
Halberstam, J. 2011. The queer art of failure. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Harrowell, E., Davies, T. and Disney, T., 2017. Making Space for Failure in Geographic Research. The Professional Geographer, pp.1-9.
Horton, J., 2008. A ‘sense of failure’? Everydayness and research ethics. Children's geographies, 6(4), pp.363-383.
Many thanks,
Thom, Tom, and Elly
|