Events / Meetings
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Activist Geographies
Location: University of Leeds, Geography
Date: 16/03/2010
Description: Engaging Geography. ESRC sponsored seminar series
Seminar 3: ”Activist Geographies” March 16th 2010.
Local organisers: Cities and Social Justice Research Group.
School of Geography. University Of Leeds.
Paul Chatterton Stuart Hodkinson, Sara Gonzalez.
Aim of the day
This one day seminar aims to showcase and interact with campaigners, researchers and activists who are developing engaging ideas, tools and techniques that aim to bring about a more socially and ecologically just world. It is aimed at people inside and outside universities alike who work in engaged, collaborative and innovative ways.
9.30am Coffee-Tea-Registration
10am Welcome and Introduction to Activist Geographies. Paul Chatterton, Sara Gonzalaz, Stuart Hodkinson
10.20am Speaker 1 followed by respondent and discussion
11.40 am Speaker 2 followed by respondent and discussion
1pm Lunch
2pm Speaker 3 followed by respondent and discussion
3.20pm Speaker 4 followed by respondent and discussion
4.40pm Closing Plenary with coffee
5.30pm Drinks and optional meal (paid for by participants)
Speakers include:
• Speaker TBC Using Information Laws to Expose State Corruption and Underpin Campaigning
• Lawrence Cassidy: Recovering Memory and the Politics of Visibility: Using Participatory Exhibitions to Challenge Regeneration and Displacement
• John Jordan: Anecdotes on treating insurrection as an art, and art as a means of preparing for the coming insurrection.
• Jai Redman. Ultimate Holding Company. Intervening in the corporate city. Leeds Plan B and beyond.
Application Process
To attend this seminar please email a completed application form to c.carson@leeds.ac.uk by February 16th 2010 at the very latest, or post to Calum Carson, School of Geography, University of Leeds, LS2 9JT, UK.
Feminism and Futurity
Location: Bristol University
Date: 25/03/2010
Description: Commentaries on the continued relevance of feminism are often pessimistic. In the United Kingdom it is common to find claims that feminism is 'yesterday's politics' (Coote 2000; Segal 1999; 2004; Toynbee 2003), and young women are part of a 'post-feminist' generation (McRobbie 2008). It is also argued that the continued relevance of academic analyses focused on feminist issues such as, for example, relationships between production and social reproduction, public and private spheres, gendered divisions of labour, and the nature of caring work require a radical rethinking in the context of a new emphasis on difference, diversity and intersectionality (Valentine 2007). One consequence is that feminism today is often seen as the politics of either an earlier time or of other places (see Mohanty 2001; Peters and Wolper 1994, amongst others).
Recently some scholars have begun to ask new questions about the times and spaces of feminism. While they agree that the dominant preoccupations and theoretical approaches of second wave feminism may require rethinking, this does not mean that feminist theory is less relevant. It is argued that feminist theory provides analytical tools to rethink time and space, which in turn transforms key conceptions of matter, subjectivity and politics (Grosz 2005: 172). During the same period geographers have also begun to rethink their core disciplinary concepts of time and space, in part as a response to recent political-economic and cultural changes. For example, Harvey's influential account of globalisation as time-space compression, recent debates about relational space (Massey 2005), the rise of the new mobilities paradigm (Cresswell 2006), and the growing interest in non-linear and multi-directional conceptions of space and time (Marston et al. 2005; Pred 2004) are prompting geographers to ask new questions in new ways.
The aim of this seminar series is draw together feminist and geographical debates to explore what new conceptions of time and space might mean for feminist geographers, in particular, and feminist scholars more generally. We are interested in two dimensions of these debates. First, we are concerned to identify and examine the new times and new spaces being revealed in contemporary feminist and gender-sensitive research, and the ways in which these problematise familiar understandings of gender, sexuality and femininity. For example, economic globalisation, postcolonial processes, new forms of governance, changing forms of community organisation, and new technologies have all reconfigured conventional understandings of relationships between production and social reproduction, men and women, sex and gender, here and there, bodies and matter. Second, we will engage with the new questions that have emerged as scholars have redeployed the analytical tools provided by feminist theory in new domains (Adkins 2004; Gibson-Graham 1996; Lury 2002). What does it mean to rethink the conventional concepts and categories of social science through contemporary feminist theory? What new questions have begun to emerge? What new conceptions of space and time are involved?
Themes
The seminar is structured around five thematically focused sessions, each of which identifies and interrogates new times and new spaces in a substantive field. These are:
* economy
* governance
* community
* nature
* life
These will be followed by a sixth synthetic session in which the implications of the seminar series for feminist theory and politics will be explicitly addressed.
More info: http://www.bris.ac.uk/geography/feminism-and-futurity/background/
Association of Annual Geographers Annual Conference
Location: Washington DC, USA
Date: 14/04/2010 - 18/04/2010
Description: Annual Conference of the Association of Amnerican Geographers.
Register at:
http://www.aag.org/annualmeetings/2010/index.htm
Home, Migration and the City: New Narratives, New Methodologies
Location: Scandic Linköping Vast, Linköping, Sweden
Date: 06/08/2010 - 10/08/2010
Description: There has been a recent surge of scholarship from human geography, sociology, history, architecture, and cultural studies that focuses on migration as a social, political, cultural and material process. This area of research on migration examines migrants’ transnational spatial practices, social and political identities and relationships with the state. Central to this research has been a recognition that at the heart of migration lies a fundamental transformation in spaces and places that are linked to the social and cultural meanings of home and belonging.
Migration brings about a material change in the places and locations through which notions of identity, individual expressions and belonging are transformed. Through the movement of people, for instance, cities, homes and localities become re-narrated through migrants’ stories, photographs, music, artwork and films. Cities in particular, as places of origin and (re)settlement become key sites of migrants’ experiences of ‘home’(s). The experience of Europe over the past fifty years is a good example; urban spaces have increasingly become contested locations where the spatial and material nature of identities are negotiated – Muslim/Christian, European/non-European, first/second generation of migrants. Much migration research, moreover, connects home and nation by investigating migrants’ connections with past, present or imagined ‘homelands’. Home can now also be described as translocal, transnational and diasporic – shaped by consumption, remittances and social networks. The domestic spaces inhabited by migrants are especially important for their roles in constructing attitudes and behaviours towards ‘others’ when strangers share living spaces in the city. Home can even be redefined through its ‘socio-technical’ differences across national spaces. This conference offers an opportunity to bring these social, spatial, material and technological facets of migration together – to consider migrants’ identities and experiences of homes and cities, and the material, aural and visual landscapes of mobility and movement.
This conference takes ‘narratives’ – broadly defined as stories, diaries, myths, photographs, music, films, media images and representations of movement – as the analytical starting point for new research on migration. Narratives have several dimensions. Firstly, migrant narratives need to be understood as inherently spatial. As is widely acknowledged, migrants’ stories of movement are often stories of different places at different moments, and thus are essentially ‘spatial stories’. Secondly, this spatiality of migration narratives is multi-scalar; it can relate to belonging on a national, political scale, represent locality dynamics, more small-scale, personal experiences of migration, or even the material narratives of migration, such as stories of significant objects and material culture. The political element of the larger scale narratives is especially important; it is these that foster the exclusion and inclusion of migrants in societies. Thirdly, the performative element of migrants’ narratives is very strong; not all narratives are textual but instead are enacted through music, theatre, film, food, or dance. Finally, such narratives can also be highly visual, corporeal, and embodied, whether through media representations, artwork, or architecture. Such a broad conceptualisation of migrant narratives demands new interdisciplinary theories and methodologies to understand the interconnected landscapes of home, migration and the city.
