CALL FOR ABSTRACTS 

Access to Resources and Environmental Histories in Africa and 
Latin America

Proposed AAG session

Sponsored by;
to be arranged......(the Cultural Ecology Specialty Group of the 
AAG, we hope)

Organized by; 
Tony Bebbington (University of Colorado, Boulder)
Simon Batterbury (Brunel University, UK)

Discussants; 
Billie Lee Turner (Clark University), and a.n. other

>From Wednesday March 25th to Sunday March 29th, the Association 
of American Geographers are holding their 94th meeting in 
Boston, Massachusetts. This event attracts over 3,500 
geographers and related professionals, the majority from North 
America. 

Call for papers:
Human-environment studies have been invigorated by both 
methodological and theoretical developments in recent years. The 
annual AAG meetings offer a regular opportunity to assess recent 
developments, and to debate individual papers and cross-cutting 
themes. 

This session will bring together diverse perspectives to allow 
for exchange of theory and method, as well as empirical 
advances. It focusses on two aspects of current work in cultural 
and political ecology, although these are not exclusive; new 
debates over rural resource access, and the current interest in 
developing "regional environmental histories".  Resource access 
is a broad theme, that includes work on gender relations, 
household and micro-politics, resource use, and the role of 
institutions and development policy. Environmental histories set 
resource use and resource access in historical context, and 
provide detailed assessments of pre- and post-colonial human 
impacts. Environmental history is most often associated with a 
North American "school" built around Donald Worster and 
colleagues. But in Africa, Latin America and Asia it has charted 
a different course; for example, providing new techniques for 
long-term studies of single localities, re-stating orthodox 
views on bio-physical change and its role in creating 
vulnerability, and challenging cultural ecologists working on 
contemporary resource management issues to consider the 
historical dimension of production systems and ecological 
diversity. Papers may address one, or both, of the resource 
access and environmental history themes.

We hope to offer two sessions of four papers each, plus 
discussion time. One session will focus on Latin American and 
one on Africa, and we are exploring publications plans for the 
session.


Offers of papers, and abstracts, should be sent to Tony 
Bebbington at three email addresses (!) by 10th August 1997, 

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marked *clearly* for his attention (he is in Latin America most 
of the summer where he will read them), with a copy to Simon 
Batterbury at 

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Our addresses are:

TB
Dept of Geography 
U of Colorado
Campus Box 260
Boulder CO 80309-0260 
USA
fax 303 492 7501

SB
Dept of Geography & Earth Sciences
Brunel University, Uxbridge Middx UB8 3PH
UK
fax +181 891 8237 until August 
tel +181 891 0121


Following selection of the papers, a complete set of abstracts, 
accompanied by payments and application forms, will be required 
by Tony for forwarding to the AAG office, who must receive them 
by September 3 at the latest. 

For those unfamiliar with the AAG conference procedure: A paper 
accepted into an organised session of this type require the 
organizer to handle all the abstracts, application details, and 
conference payments, and all of these should be submitted via 
the organiser (Tony, in this case). The application form may be 
found in the May issue of the AAG Newsletter. We can supply you 
with all the relevant details. However if your paper is not 
accepted into a named session, you will be re-allocated to 
another relevant session - no papers are refused at the 
meetings. Meeting fees are US$120 for AAG members ($60 students) 
and $170 non-members ($90 students). 

We look forward to hearing from you.




Simon Batterbury, Geography & Earth Sciences,
Brunel University, 
Uxbridge, Middx UB8 3PH
UK
fax +181 891 8237 until August 1997
tel +181 891 0121
e-mail: [log in to unmask]







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