Call for Papers: International Conference of Critical Geography (Ramallah, 26-30 July 2015)

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Nov 13, 2014
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Call for Papers: International Conference of Critical Geography (Ramallah, 26-30 July 2015)

By : Jadaliyya Reports

Open Call for Participation

7th International Conference of Critical Geography

‘Precarious Radicalism On Shifting Grounds: Towards a Politics of Possibility’ 

26-30 July 2015  |  Ramallah, Palestine | www.iccg2015.org
 

ANNOUNCEMENT

The sense of revolutionary times triggered by recent events such as the Greek revolts, the Indignados and Occupy movements, as well as the Arab uprisings and the Idle No More protests in Canada, has been gradually overshadowed by a wave of virulent and violent responses by both state and global powers. Although these and other struggles have captured our imagination, an anxious feeling of being in a permanent state of crisis seems to have taken over as we observe an increase in and normalization of socio-economic and spatial inequalities and political repression against the population. This regression, which takes the form of a rise on authoritarianisms, revanchists’ responses, encroachment of fundamental rights, precarity of subsistence, social relations, employment, or the consolidation of populist right wing and fundamentalist movements, is to a large extent eclipsing and undermining the political space and fundamental work of individuals, communities and movements around the world. It certainly is a precarious time for radicalism. This grim landscape inevitably raises crucial questions about the current moment and its prospects. Are we witnessing and experiencing a fundamental historical shift? If so, how are we to interpret this transition? Or can these times be transformed into a moment of political possibility by reconsidering and/or expanding existing paradigms as well as by reconnecting solidarities and struggles?

The aim of the 7th International Conference of Critical Geography (ICCG 2015) is to provide an inclusive venue for the discussion of these and other themes that examine the geographies of critical social theory and progressive political praxis. Despite the significance of the issues at stake, we hope to create a fun, engaging and friendly atmosphere that welcomes a wide array of scholars, activists, artists, organizers and others interested in critical socio-spatial praxis.
 

CALL FOR PARTICIPATION

The ICCG 2015 will be organized around nine main themes (see below) that connect to and expand the conference underlying subject, that is ‘Precarious Radicalism On Shifting Grounds: Towards a Politics of Possibility’. 

Deadline for submissions is 1st December 2014. We invite you to submit paper abstracts and encourage proposals for populated panels, roundtable discussions, or sessions with alternative formats that address the proposed conference themes. As indicated in the application form, we ask that you include (a) information on which conference theme your panel or paper addresses; (b) title of your paper or session; (c) a brief bio (max. 100 words) of each participant with contact information, institutional affiliation, and any titles you would like placed in the program; (d) an abstract (max 500 words). Please take into consideration that proposed activities should fit into the 90-minutes time-slots. Feel free to issue your own Call for Panels through appropriate mailing lists such as CRITICAL-GEOG-FORUM, URB-GEOG-FORUM, CRIT-LAG-GEOG, LEFTGEOG, PYGYWG, H-NET, etc. before submitting to us.

The forms for Application for Paper and Application for Panel can be found under www.iccg2015.org/call/

Please read the conference’s political statement before submitting your applications.

Selection decisions will be announced by 31st December 2014.

Send questions and proposals to submit@iccg2015.org 
 

CONFERENCE THEMES

1 | Imperial, Colonial, Postcolonial and Anti-colonial geographies

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to, the following: colonial, anti-colonial, and post-colonial legacies and contestations; colonial cities/urbanism; political economies of colonialism/occupation; settler colonialism past and present; apartheid across borders and epochs; indigenous activism and revolutionary movements; securitization, militarization and privatization of space; land grabs; urban warfare and the war on terror; critical geopolitics, etc.

2 | Articulations and spaces of capitalism 

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to, the following: financialization of capital and space, economies of urban development; alternative economies/economic alternatives; extraction industries and primitive accumulation; debt/credit economies; social reproduction and work; “free”, unpaid and slave labour in the 21st century; undocumented, informal and transnational work; (new forms of) labour struggles and unionism; class struggles and new conceptions of class; state interventions in the lives of economies, etc.

3 | Migration, Mobility and Displacement

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to, the following: immobilities, regulating mobilities, borders, migrant and refugee subjectivities, global labor, (urban) asylum politics, fortress Europe, securitization, south-south mobilities, human trafficking, refugee and migrant health and well-being, etc. 

4 | Nature, Society and Environmental Change 

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to, the following: commodification of nature; urban metabolisms; environmental and climate justice; governing nature/society relations; feminist, racialized and queer positionalities within urban political ecology; mining and extraction; energy and water transitions; provincializing and urbanizing political ecology; climate debt environmental racism and disposable life; food justice and urban agriculture; perspectives on the anthropocene; ecocide, etc.

 5 | Mapping Bodies, Corporeality and Violence 

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to, the following: corporeality in crisis and contestation; bodily intersections/assemblages of race, gender and sexuality; primitive accumulation and the body; materializing theorizations of the body in space and time; production and reproduction of corporeality; body as target - war and urban contest; blackness, body and the afterlives of slavery; racialized re-segregations, containments and displacements; decolonizing the body; structural violence, marked bodies and everyday life; queer assemblages and the national body; carceral geographies, etc.

6 | Critical “Development” Geographies: perspectives from the Global South 

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to, the following: critical and southern perspectives on development; decolonizing development; aid, donors and development interventions; the privatization and financialization of development aid; geographies of uneven development; postcolonial theory and development; development ethnographies; development, security, and bordering; geopolitics and biopolitics of development; technopolitics; gender and development, governmentality and development; etc.

7 | Geography and matter / materiality 

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to, the following: materialist approaches to materiality; the materiality of inequality and dispossession; materiality in urban studies; materiality and power; vital materialisms; more than human geographies; the politics of urban assemblages; assemblage theory and methods; assemblage theory for strategic political action; socio-technical and socio-natural geographies; urban metabolisms; materializing political ecology, technopolitics and expert knowledge; emancipatory materialities; etc.

8 | Remaking Space through Ideology, Culture, and Arts 

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to, the following: reclaiming space; identities and lifestyles; diasporic and migrant artistic engagement; high-art and architectural commodification of space; ideological narratives, othering and spatial enclosures; art, the ‘creative class’ and urban commodification; monuments, geography and nationalism; feminism and histories of urban art; geography, ideology and transgression; art and practices of resistance; art, ideology and everyday space; landscapes, memory, monuments, and commemoration; psychogeography and radical cartographies; exploring urban spaces through artistic practices, etc.

9 | Knowledge Production, Education and Epistemic Agendas

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to, the following: corporatization of knowledge and exclusion in academia; the politics of open source; democratization and knowledge-production; southern theory; anarchists and dissident education; beyond eurocentric knowledge; radical pedagogies; resistance and education; the role of indigenous knowledge in the academy; participatory action research in teaching, learning and research; practicing solidarities, education and social change; education and justice; challenges of multi-disciplinarity and trans-disciplinarity; co-production of knowledge; value orientations and epistemic agendas; political conditions and consequences of the production and use of knowledge, etc.


ABOUT THE CONFERENCE 

Field Trips: This edition capitalizes on the context by putting emphasis on fieldtrips that will build upon and further expand the conference themes through an engagement with local articulations and actors. Excursions correspond to a third of the total program duration, whereby a repertoire of 6 routes and destinations will be available for participants to choose from in accordance to preferences. Details in this regard will be released in spring 2015. 

Limited Places: Kindly note that due to logistical considerations participation space will be limited to 250 persons. 

This conference complies with the Palestinian Call for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel

More information about the conference in our website www.iccg2015.org

We look forward to seeing you in Palestine! 

 
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Past is Present: Settler Colonialism Matters!

On 5-6 March 2011, the Palestine Society at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London will hold its seventh annual conference, "Past is Present: Settler Colonialism in Palestine." This year`s conference aims to understand Zionism as a settler colonial project which has, for more than a century, subjected Palestine and Palestinians to a structural and violent form of destruction, dispossession, land appropriation and erasure in the pursuit of a new Jewish Israeli society. By organizing this conference, we hope to reclaim and revive the settler colonial paradigm and to outline its potential to inform and guide political strategy and mobilization.

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is often described as unique and exceptional with little resemblance to other historical or ongoing colonial conflicts. Yet, for Zionism, like other settler colonial projects such as the British colonization of Ireland or European settlement of North America, South Africa or Australia, the imperative is to control the land and its resources -- and to displace the original inhabitants. Indeed, as conference keynote speaker Patrick Wolfe, one of the foremost scholars on settler colonialism and professor at La Trobe University in Victoria, Australia, argues, "the logic of this project, a sustained institutional tendency to eliminate the Indigenous population, informs a range of historical practices that might otherwise appear distinct--invasion is a structure not an event."[i]

Therefore, the classification of the Zionist movement as a settler colonial project, and the Israeli state as its manifestation, is not merely intended as a statement on the historical origins of Israel, nor as a rhetorical or polemical device. Rather, the aim is to highlight Zionism`s structural continuities and the ideology which informs Israeli policies and practices in Palestine and toward Palestinians everywhere. Thus, the Nakba -- whether viewed as a spontaneous, violent episode in war, or the implementation of a preconceived master plan -- should be understood as both the precondition for the creation of Israel and the logical outcome of Zionist settlement in Palestine.

Moreover, it is this same logic that sustains the continuation of the Nakba today. As remarked by Benny Morris, “had he [David Ben Gurion] carried out full expulsion--rather than partial--he would have stabilised the State of Israel for generations.”[ii] Yet, plagued by an “instability”--defined by the very existence of the Palestinian nation--Israel continues its daily state practices in its quest to fulfill Zionism’s logic to maximize the amount of land under its control with the minimum number of Palestinians on it. These practices take a painful array of manifestations: aerial and maritime bombardment, massacre and invasion, house demolitions, land theft, identity card confiscation, racist laws and loyalty tests, the wall, the siege on Gaza, cultural appropriation, and the dependence on willing (or unwilling) native collaboration and security arrangements, all with the continued support and backing of imperial power. 

Despite these enduring practices however, the settler colonial paradigm has largely fallen into disuse. As a paradigm, it once served as a primary ideological and political framework for all Palestinian political factions and trends, and informed the intellectual work of committed academics and revolutionary scholars, both Palestinians and Jews.

The conference thus asks where and why the settler colonial paradigm was lost, both in scholarship on Palestine and in politics; how do current analyses and theoretical trends that have arisen in its place address present and historical realities? While acknowledging the creativity of these new interpretations, we must nonetheless ask: when exactly did Palestinian natives find themselves in a "post-colonial" condition? When did the ongoing struggle over land become a "post-conflict" situation? When did Israel become a "post-Zionist" society? And when did the fortification of Palestinian ghettos and reservations become "state-building"?

In outlining settler colonialism as a central paradigm from which to understand Palestine, this conference re-invigorates it as a tool by which to analyze the present situation. In doing so, it contests solutions which accommodate Zionism, and more significantly, builds settler colonialism as a political analysis that can embolden and inform a strategy of active, mutual, and principled Palestinian alignment with the Arab struggle for self-determination, and indigenous struggles in the US, Latin America, Oceania, and elsewhere.

Such an alignment would expand the tools available to Palestinians and their solidarity movement, and reconnect the struggle to its own history of anti-colonial internationalism. At its core, this internationalism asserts that the Palestinian struggle against Zionist settler colonialism can only be won when it is embedded within, and empowered by, the broader Arab movement for emancipation and the indigenous, anti-racist and anti-colonial movement--from Arizona to Auckland.

SOAS Palestine Society invites everyone to join us at what promises to be a significant intervention in Palestine activism and scholarship.

For over 30 years, SOAS Palestine Society has heightened awareness and understanding of the Palestinian people, their rights, culture, and struggle for self-determination, amongst students, faculty, staff, and the broader public. SOAS Palestine society aims to continuously push the frontiers of discourse in an effort to make provocative arguments and to stimulate debate and organizing for justice in Palestine through relevant conferences, and events ranging from the intellectual and political impact of Edward Said`s life and work (2004), international law and the Palestine question (2005), the economy of Palestine and its occupation (2006), the one state (2007), 60 Years of Nakba, 60 Years of Resistance (2009), and most recently, the Left in Palestine (2010).

For more information on the SOAS Palestine Society 7th annual conference, Past is Present: Settler Colonialism in Palestine: www.soaspalsoc.org

SOAS Palestine Society Organizing Collective is a group of committed students that has undertaken to organize annual academic conferences on Palestine since 2003.

 

[i] Patrick Wolfe, Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology: The Politics and Poetics of an Ethnographic Event, Cassell, London, p. 163

[ii] Interview with Benny Morris, Survival of the Fittest, Haaretz, 9. January 2004, http://cosmos.ucc.ie/cs1064/jabowen/IPSC/php/art.php?aid=5412