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Association of American
Geographers Conference,
CFP: Places of integration,
spaces for difference
The politics of diversity
has been subject to a significant re-inscription since the turn of the
century. With the proclamations on the death of multiculturalism and
heightened fears of segregation, there has been a concurrent rise in policy and
academic circles of an entangled lexicon of integration, cohesion and mixed
communities. For some commentators, the result is a turn back to an ethos
of assimilation where alterity is to be curbed and made spatially
insignificant. Yet the articulations in policies and practices perhaps
paints a more complex picture: cohesion contains a laundry list of political
values, we are told integration is not to be confused with assimilation but
taken as a two way process, and mixed communities contain both the ideal of
inclusion and complaints of a moralising, melancholic imperative.
This session seeks to
explore the sentiments, practices and implications surrounding
integrationism. Is integrationism just a new language of old or has it
more to offer? How is integration justified and idealised? How are
the ideals of integration translated into the specific concerns, experiences
and struggles of multicultural localities and with what effect? What of
the spaces of dissidence, anti-racism and/or conviviality? How do the
governmental technologies of cohesion render visible its political subjects?
What potential role might the newly minted Equality and Human Rights Commission
play in creating discourses around difference and cohesion? Finally, how
might geographers advance existing understandings of the ethnic continuum
between segregation-desegregation in light of these refreshed debates on
integration and identity politics?
Authors are invited to send
a title and an abstract of no more than 250 words to Wun Fung Chan ([log in to unmask]) and Fayyaz
Vellani ([log in to unmask])
by no later than the 10th October 2008.
Dr Wun Fung Chan
Department of Geography and Sociology
G1 1XN
Tel: 0141 548 3795
Fax 0141 552 7857