CALL FOR PAPERS: RGS-IBG Annual Conference 2019, 28-30 August 2019, London
Troubling or hopeful? Thinking and doing Geography as Interdisciplinarity.
Convenors: Jennifer Lidia Veenstra and Anna Krzywoszynska, University of Sheffield.
Geography is often called ‘inherently interdisciplinary’. At the same time, there are good internal and external reasons to revisit this claim and ask both what the nature of this interdisciplinarity is today, and how we may want it to develop further. From the ‘inside’, some of the most urgent challenges associated with the Anthropocene demand engagement with socio-natures as knowable and relevant to both natural, social scientific, and arts and humanities inquiry. Critical physical geography (Lave et al., 2014) is charting a promising pathway for making the best of both ‘human’ and ‘physical’ geographical scholarship in this context – but are we making the best of this opportunity in practice? From the ‘outside’, the growing importance of interdisciplinarity in research funding is pushing/giving opportunities to human geographers to engage more closely with natural science colleagues outside of geography, with potentially productive as well as disruptive consequences (here we could learn from the experience of sociologists working in Science and Technology Studies, e.g. (Balmer et al., 2015)).
Following Lave et. al’s 2014 provocation to “combine critical attention to relations of social power with deep knowledge of biophysical science or technology in the service of social and environmental transformation”, the aim of this session is to take stock of the changing nature of interdisciplinarity in geography, and of the place of geography in the increasingly interdisciplinary academic landscape.
This panel will combine short 10-minute presentations with a roundtable discussion. The aim of the short presentations is provide ‘food for thought’ and case studies for an examination of geography’s changing interdisciplinarity. The aim of the roundtable discussion is to further share experiences, and debate the potential for building a working group on Geographies of Interdisciplinarity/Interdisciplinary Geographies.
Some proposed themes include, but are not limited to:
- For a geographer, is interdisciplinarity a requirement or an option?
- Is it possible to maintain an ontological and epistemological plurality in interdisciplinary research or is there a need for new conceptual frameworks?
- What challenges and opportunities does interdisciplinarity pose in relation to teaching geography, at different levels? Can we find productive ways of bridging the persistent divide between ‘human’ and ‘physical’ geography in our curricula?
- What is, and what could be/should be the ‘shape’ of interdisciplinary in Geography?
- Which knowledge gaps result from the disciplinary divide between ´human´ and ´physical´ geography? Which other undesired consequences is disciplinarity creating?
- What does interdisciplinarity do to our methods? Can we use existing methods applied to new problems or do we need to develop new methods of interdisciplinary geographical inquiry?
- Which ethical challenges do we have to consider when re-thinking disciplinarity?
Abstracts of 200-250 words should be sent to [log in to unmask] and [log in to unmask] by end of the day on Friday 8th February 2019.
We will confirm acceptance of abstracts by 11th February.
Balmer AS, Calvert J, Marris C, Molyneux-Hodgson S, Frow E, Kearnes M, Bulpin K, Schyfter P, Mackenzie A and Martin P 2015 Taking roles in interdisciplinary collaborations: Reflections on working in post-ELSI spaces in the UK synthetic biology community Science & Technology Studies
Lave R, Wilson MW, Barron ES, Biermann C, Carey MA, Duvall CS, Johnson L, Lane KM, McClintock N, Munroe D, Pain R, Proctor J, Rhoads BL, Robertson MM, Rossi J, Sayre NF, Simon G, Tadaki M and Van Dyke C 2014 Intervention: Critical physical geography The Canadian Geographer / Le Géographe canadien 58 1-10
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