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Dear colleagues,

you are cordially invited to The future of the territorial state<https://www.helsinki.fi/en/news/society-economy/workshop-call-for-papers-the-future-of-the-territorial-state> -workshop in University of Helsinki, Finland.

Date: 10th - 11th December 2018

Organizers: Juho Luukkonen & Sami Moisio, RELATE Centre of Excellence, Department of Geosciences and Geography, University of Helsinki

Venue: University of Helsinki, Yliopistonkatu 4, Think Corner (Tiedekulma)

Initial program of the workshop

10.12.2018
12.00                  Opening words, Sami Moisio, professor, University of Helsinki, Finland
12.05                  Keynote presentation, Hanna Ylöstalo, researcher, University of Helsinki, Finland
13.15                  Coffee break
13.45                  Keynote presentation, Ugo Rossi, associate professor, University of Turin, Italy
15.00                  Panel discussion: Geopolitics of the Knowledge-Based Economy
                                                          Panelists: Sami Moisio, Ugo Rossi, Hanna Ylöstalo, (fourth panelist will be confirmed later)
19.00                  Dinner

11.12. 2018
9.00                     Paper session I
10.45                  Coffee
11.15                  Paper session II
13.00                  Lunch

The scope of the workshop
The questions of what is state and how to explore it analytically have gained new relevance during the last few decades among academics. Such societal phenomena as the increase of the global interdependencies of the economies, the formation of international and subnational political organizations and the transnationalization of policy making stimulated many scholars and consultants to proclaim in the 1990s the hollowing out or retreat of the territorial nation-state. However, while this is still popular prophecy in particular political cadres, scholars across social sciences and humanities have proven that this is not the case. Many have argued that rather than withering away states have been under constant change over the past decades as part of global capitalist restructuring - and that this transformation has notable spatial dimensions. States continue to play significant role as political actors and sites of political struggles in various geographical scales.
The afore-mentioned state transformation have posed serious philosophical and methodological challenges for academic scholars studying the state. The conventional understandings of the state as a neatly demarcated territorial container or as a unified territorial actor seem not to provide fruitful starting points for grasping the complex and refined relations of authority, power and territoriality of which the state is constituted. This two-day lunch-to-lunch workshop invites state scholars from different disciplinary traditions to share ideas and discuss how we might better understand and conceptualize the new modes and manifestations of state territoriality, governmentality and governance.
While there have been various academic debates on the changes in the states' political and administrative structures already for decades, this workshop brings to the fore three particularly important debates. The first debate dates back to the early 1980s when geographers called for the establishment of the "new regional geography" approach. Since then, the tradition has oriented scholars for studying states and other territorial configurations and theirs restructuring in the context of broader societal processes and thus, liberating inquiries from the "territorial trap" of nation-states and other taken for granted spatial-political structures. Second debate, in which especially planning and policy scholars have been actively involved, concerns the emergence of soft spaces of governance and the global circulation of policy ideas and the corollary consequences for the state territoriality in the increasingly "post-political" and "neoliberal" world. Third and the most recent debate concerns the relationship between the territorial state and global urbanization, a relationship that brings to the fore the co-constitution of material aspects of global capitalism and state territorial re-structuring.
The workshop seeks to bring together these strands of research and to gather together a multi-disciplinary group of academic scholars interested in state as a spatial-political actor and/or object of politics and technologies of government. We welcome both empirical and theoretical contributions to the sessions. Potential topics include but are not limited to: urbanization of the nation-state; the role of planning in state spatial restructuring; transnational policy-making and central government; city-state relations; state territorial transformation and global capitalism; the role of experts and consultants in guiding state related policy-making.
Scholars interested in state theories and/or doing research on states can participate to the workshop either with full paper, shorter texts discussing "work in progress" or with bullet points listing initial ideas and thoughts on the state-related research. Participants are expected to give a short presentation laying out the main questions they wish to address (10-15 minutes), followed by 5 minutes of discussion.
Call for papers/presentations: To enroll to the workshop with a presentation, please send a 150-word abstract of your work to Juho Luukkonen ([log in to unmask]) by 16.11.2018.
If you want to attend the seminar without giving a presentation, please register by sending an e-mail to [log in to unmask] by 3.12.2018 and let us know if you will be attending full time of just a part of the seminar.



For more information, please contact:

Juho Luukkonen
RELATE Centre of Excellence
Department of Geosciences and Geography
PL 4 (Yliopistokatu 3)
FI-00014 University of Helsinki
Finland
tel. +358(0)50-3046766
http://helsinki.academia.edu/JuhoLuukkonen

or visit our SP³ research group webpages: http://www.helsinki.fi/spatial-policy-politics-and-planning

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