CALL FOR PAPERS invited by Royal Geographical Society-IBG Conference at Edinburgh from 3rd to 5th July, 2012. This event will be sponsored by Social and Cultural Geography Research Group. Moreover, the event will be organized by Franklin Ginn (Edinburgh), Uli Beisel (LSHTM), Maan Barua (Oxford).
This session invites reflections on human as well as nonhuman relations which are marked by conflict, aggression, killing or death. Initially conceived as a response to antagonistic environmental politics, more-than-human geographies have mostly emphasized affirmative ways of ‘being with’ nonhuman creatures. The strength of these accounts has been to model the vitality, liveliness and complex interweaving of humans and nonhumans in shaping our world.
This session aims to move beyond these conceptualizations by exploring more problematic relations that link human, animal and plant life on earth. Hypothesizing that the focus on conviviality reflects not only a choice of subject (of studying companion-able animals), but also of location (accounts based in Euro-American or ‘Western’ settings), the session aims to explore what might lie outside of these choices that have led us to shy away from more explicit engagements with conflict and killing? We invite papers that focus on failure, break-down, powerlessness, asymmetry, non-relation, conflict or killing in more-than-human geographies.
We invite papers that engage with:
- Non-humans as disease vectors
- Dangerous or aggressive animals
- Human practices of aggression and destruction of animal or plant habitats
- More-than-human geographies beyond Euro-American settings
- Dilemmas of killing and preservation in ecological conservation initiatives
- Non-human death or finitude
We especially encourage conceptual or position papers. We also invite empirical papers with contemporary and/or historical foci and/or employing experimental methods. The session will comprise a series of short paper presentations followed by a lengthier discussion facilitated by two discussants.
Abstracts (250 words) should be submitted by Monday 23 January 2012.
For further information, visit the link.
