Papers from the Social and Cultural Geography Research Group sponsored conference, organised by Darren Smith, Kath Browne and David Bissell held in Brighton in 2009, are now published in the journal of Social and Cultural Geography.

The forum includes the following papers.  Many of these will need an institutional subscription to the journal for access (via journal link above), but a few are available through author links (links below).

• ‘Reinvigorating social geographies? A ‘social re/turn’ for a changing social world: (re)opening a debate’ By Darren P. Smith, Kath Browne & David Bissell
• ‘Redundant? Resurgent? Relevant? Social Geography in Social & Cultural Geography’ by Phil Hubbard
• ‘Multiple, marginalised, passé or politically engaged? Some reflections on the current place of social geographies’ by Peter Hopkins
• ‘US Social Geography, alive and well?’ by Vincent Del Casino
• ‘Navigating a non-representational research landscape and representing ‘under-represented groups’: from complexity to strategic essentialism (and back)’ by Hannah Macpherson
• ‘Geography, race and emotions: social and cultural intersections’ by Anoop Nayak

The SCGRG are organizing two ‘in-house’ events for this conference:

• Social and Cultural Geographies in a Time of Crisis (discussion panel)
• Social and Cultural Geographies of Impact

The group will be co-sponsoring two conference Chair’s plenary sessions (details tba):

• (In)secure spaces
• (In)secure peoples

We are also delighted to be sponsoring the following submitted paper sessions below.

• Ludic Geographies
• More-than-human geographies: from coexistence to conflict and killing
• Home Unmaking
• Licensing spaces, things and people
• ‘Policing’ geographies: engendering securities and insecurities
• Writing and doing human geography research in Greece during a turbulent decade

Further details on the conference are available via the RGS website. Please get in contact with session organisers for further details of any of these sessions and for information on how to submit a paper.

The deadline for session organisers to submit completed session proposal forms for SCGRG sponsored sessions to the RGS is January 31st 2012.

A discussion panel convened by Ben Anderson and the SCGRG

How should social and cultural geography respond to a world that is either in crisis or where various events and situations are now framed in terms of crisis? How do social and cultural geographers understand the material and imaginative geographies of crises? And how does responding to crisis demand or invite social and cultural geographers to change their habits of thinking, research and action?

The panel asks what social and cultural geography might be and become at a time when the multiple events and situations are currently being understood as crises; the credit crunch, climate change, resource scarcity, universities, terrorism and political violence, over-consumption, urban unrest and inequalities, social reproduction, climate change and environmental damage … to name but a few events in what has become an open-ended list. Of course, the contemporary condition is not the first where the vocabulary of crisis has come to dominate the political imaginary and to be worked into the fabric of the everyday: we could think of the oil crisis of the 70s, the Cuban missile crisis, or longstanding claims to a crisis of masculinity, for example. Now used to denote a temporary situation that threatens harm and requires some form of decisive action, even if the precise nature of the action is not known, the proliferation of crises and crisis talk poses challenges to social and cultural geography. Put simply: what could and should our relation to the phenomena of crisis be? Should we trace the relations of (dis)continuity that make up particular crises? Should we invoke and attempt to understand the ‘context’ for the manifestation of any particular crisis – whether we want to frame that context in terms such as neoliberalism or finance capitalism? Should we bear witness to the distribution of harms and damages that surround specific crises or the geographies of insecurity that become part of crises? Perhaps, instead, we should follow the performative effects of naming certain events as crises, or maybe follow the specific techniques and technologies through which events which have been named as crises are governed. Perhaps we could turn to the roots of the term crisis in the Greek krinõ – meaning to cut, to select, to decide – and find in crises the possibility for other and better ways of living?

The panel will explore these and other options in a bid to think through what social and cultural geography might do in a time of crisis and how its existing practices of thinking and modes of research can engage with the contemporary condition. Confirmed panellists so far include Alex Vasudaven and Rachel Pain, with more names to be confirmed in the new year. If you are interested in taking part in this panel, please get in touch with Ben Anderson or Gail Davies.

Social and Cultural Geographies of Impact

Sponsored by the Social and Cultural Geography Research Group (SCGRG)

What is ‘impact’?  How do we evidence ‘impact’?  What makes ‘impactful’ research? How do those outside the academy understand ‘impact’?  What are the stakes of ‘impact’ for postgraduates and academia?

This session will explore the emerging social and cultural geographies of ‘impact’.  Whilst currently understood (or conceived) in terms of the Research Excellence Framework (REF), this session aims to unpack and expand understandings and conceptualizations of impact, generating discussion and debate through two innovative sessions.  Overall, this session seeks to generate a critical forum for discussing, debating, supporting and listening to ideas about ‘impact’ as we navigate through the current landscape of geography in higher education and research institutions.

Whilst the first session will take the form of postcard-based small group discussions, in the second session we will be hosting short, critical ‘impact statements’ (short papers or think pieces) from a range of academic and non-academic participants at AC2012.  We would like to hear about ‘impact’ from a range of different viewpoints (critical, creative, within and beyond the academy) and from researchers at all stages of their career.

If you would like to present a short paper (or ‘impact statement’) of no more than 5 minutes, please send titles and short abstracts (max. 150 words) to Sarah Mills (sm599@le.ac.uk), Amanda Rogers (A.Rogers@rhul.ac.uk) and Mia Hunt (Maria.Hunt.2010@live.rhul.ac.uk) by Friday, 20th January 2012.

Please note that this session is likely to take place in an alternative and informal space at the conference with NO AV support.  We hope this will create an inclusive and engaging environment and go ‘beyond powerpoint’…

Call for Papers:

Writing and doing human geography research in Greece during a turbulent decade: From the ‘relative security’ of fragmented neoliberalization to the ‘insecurity’ of the Greek debt crisis

Mr Lazaros Karaliotas Lazaros.karaliotas@postgrad.manchester.ac.uk

Mr Georgios Tzimas Georgios.Tzimas@postgrad.manchester.ac.uk

School of Environment and Development, University of Manchester.

Since the late 1990s, the Greek government embarked in a contradictory and contingent process of partially applying – under the notion of modernizing the country up to 2004 and under the notion of re-establishing the state up to 2009 by the succeeding government – a series of neoliberal policies that included the development of mega-events and mega-projects, the privatization of public services, the introduction of PFIs, the reform of the Greek educational, healthcare and welfare systems and the reorganization of national, regional and local governance towards a smaller but centralized state. These policies, along with a series of phenomena that affected Greece during that decade, such as the influx of global migration flows, the restructuring of the Greek economy and the Athens December riots in 2008; led to radical changes to the economic, political, social and cultural environment of the country. The emergence of the global recession in 2008 and the subsequent Greek debt crisis has led to the implementation of a structural adjustment program since 2010, that has introduced a new series of radical changes in the Greek society. This session seeks to examine Greece as an area of human geography research in a twofold way. Firstly, it provides a space for presenting research that addresses particular aspects of the processes of neoliberalization that unfolded in Greece since the late 1990s. Secondly, it attempts to interrogate theoretical and methodological issues of doing human geography research within an insecure and unstable context such as the Greek one. We welcome theoretically and empirically informed papers that address the following:

• Theorizing the form and role of the Greek state since the late 1990s.
• The implementation, of neoliberal polices and the restructuring of economy in Greece before and during the ‘Greek debt crisis’.
• Social and cultural transformations of the Greek society, particularly issues related to class, gender, identity, consumption culture and cultural representation.
• Urban restructuring and gentrification in Greek cities since the late 1990s and their inter-linkages with neo-liberal policies.
• Global migration flows and their impacts in Greece at a local, national and transnational scale.
• Geographies of resistance, and social movements during the austerity period in Greece.
• Constructing theoretical frameworks for writing human geography research in Greece: Between the dominance of the Anglophone discourse and the adoption of local alternative theories.
• Conducting human geography research in Greece: Research methodologies and issues for studying a society under political and economic insecurity.

RGS-IBG Conference, Edinburgh 3rd – 5th July 2012

Sponsored by the Social and Cultural Geography Research Group

Organisers: James Kneale, UCL, and David Beckingham, University of Cambridge

How do states ensure security without directly intervening in the affairs of individuals? Several decades of discussion have expanded our conception of governmentality, its workings and its consequences, but it may be time to consider the work of a modest, ubiquitous but extraordinarily effective technology in solving this problem. In Law’s Dream of a Common Knowledge (2003) socio-legal theorist Mariana Valverde suggests that one of the common ways in which this dilemma is managed is through the legal technology of the license, and these insights have proved fruitful to Nick Blomley, Phil Hubbard, and other geographers.

Licensing, for Valverde, represents a flexible form of governmentality that works in unexpected ways. It may well be a form of police science, but it often relies upon private individuals like publicans for its effectiveness, “contracting out the governmental work of preventing disorder and monitoring risks to the private sector”. In Britain the licensing of alcohol was administered by amateurs (magistrates) – and not the central or local state – for over 450 years, with pronounced local differences. Licensing is also dependent upon and produces a particular form of ad hoc, non-expert knowledge (“the epistemology of detail”), which does not always grant power but may instead be a burden – barstaff, for example, have a ‘duty to know’ whether a patron is too drunk to be served.

Valverde’s conception of licensing also allows practice and the non-human back into debates about governmentality. Licensing governs and reshapes spaces, temporalities, and activities. We invite papers that explore how governing ‘uses’ in this way works on both people and things, from the everyday to the apparently exceptional – including but not restricted to foodstuffs, weeds, professional associations, advertising boards, pets, alcohol, firearms and drugs.

We welcome papers on any form of licensing which makes a difference to spaces, allowing us to trace these and other issues:

• The uncertain outcomes of governing through licensing
• Histories and geographies of licensing (legal and cultural, at a variety of scales)
• Licensing and expert/non-expert knowledges
• Licensing and the differences between action, habit and identity (with reference to sexuality, drunkenness, etc)
• The objects of licensing and the role of objects in licensing space

All titles and abstracts (max 250 words) should be submitted to James Kneale j.kneale@ucl.ac.uk or David Beckingham djb79@cam.ac.uk by Monday the 23^rd January 2012 at the latest, as the deadline for completed sessions is much earlier than usual this year.

RGS-IBG Conference, Edinburgh 3rd – 5th July 2012
Sponsored by: Social and Cultural Geography Research Group
Organisers: Katherine Brickell (Royal Holloway University of London) katherine.brickell@rhul.ac.uk; Richard Baxter (Queen Mary University of London) r.baxter@qmul.ac.uk

Recent months have been dominated by news stories and visual images of home and its ‘unmaking’. From the state-enforced violent eviction of travellers living at Dale Farm in the United Kingdom to the signalling of regime change through the ransacking of Gaddafi family mansions in Libya, home is not separated from public and political worlds but is constituted, threatened or dissolved, through them. These events follow a series of years in which home has met the hard edge of the global economy with house repossession, resulting from Western debt over-reach, again pointing to the fragility of dwelling. Moving beyond the once celebratory hailing of home as an apolitical, ‘inward-looking’ and secure space, this session approaches home as a physical, immaterial and symbolic site that is ‘outward-looking’, insecure, and subject to deliberate or unintentional disruption and destruction. Aiming to develop the now established literature on home making practices, it seeks to uncover new theoretical and empirical work on the politics, processes and everyday experiences of home unmaking at different spatial scales. It also encourages work that offers imaginative and practical engagements and guidelines for ‘doing’ something to address these domestic injustices.

Themes could include, but are not limited to, home unmaking and:

• Eviction and repossession
• Demolition
• Dereliction
• War and conflict
• Disasters and climate change
• Mobility
• Marital breakdown
• Lifecourse transitions
• Divestment
• Domicide
• Homelessness
• Activism
• Art and artistic practice
• Policy

RGS-IBG Conference, Edinburgh 3rd – 5th July 2012
Sponsored by: Social and Cultural Geography Research Group
Organisers: Uli Beisel (LSHTM), Franklin Ginn (Edinburgh), Maan Barua (Oxford)
Discussants: Gail Davies (UCL), Steve Pile (OU)

This session invites reflections on human-nonhuman relations that are marked by conflict, aggression, killing or death. Initially conceived as a response to antagonistic environmental politics, more-than-human geographies have mostly emphasised affirmative ways of ‘being with’ nonhuman creatures. The strength of these accounts has been to model the vitality, liveliness and complex interweavings of humans and nonhumans in shaping our world (e.g. Whatmore, 2002; Hinchliffe, 2010). With some notable exceptions (Yussoff, 2009, 2010; Harrison, 2008; Clark, 2010; Roe et al., 2008) most accounts have, thus, concentrated on presence, accommodation, conviviality, or attended to disciplinary techno-human assemblages aimed at taming animals – be it for science or as a food. After a decade of writings in more-than-human geography this session aims to move beyond these conceptualisations 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 welcome 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 welcome empirical papers with contemporary and/or historical foci and/or employing experimental methods. The session will consist of a series of short paper presentations followed by a lengthier discussion facilitated by two discussants.

Abstracts (250 words) should be submitted by Monday 23/01/2012 to Uli Beisel (uli.beisel@gmail.com), Franklin Ginn (franklin.ginn@ed.ac.uk) or Maan Barua (maan.barua@ouce.ox.ac.uk)

Ludic Geographies

Tara Woodyer, University of Exeter (t.l.woodyer@exeter.ac.uk)

Fraser MacDonald, University of Edinburgh (fraser.macdonald@ed.ac.uk)

This session invites geographers to consider the ludic as more than child’s play. It is a fundamental part of human experience across the lifecourse. Though often undervalued, it is broader and more complex than common associations allow. Geographers, among others, have recently turned to play in their studies of the workplace, urban practice, consumption, public protest and geopolitics. It is present too in recent moves towards affirmative modes of critique, more-than-rational ways of working, and experimentation with creative styles of writing. Throughout this work there is a growing appreciation that the ludic is a significant geographical concern in and of itself.

Ludic Geographies draws together research that examines the relation of play to the everyday and to rationality. It aims to open up the ethical potential of play for academic analysis, creative experiment and political practice. The session notably resists a metaphysical positioning of play as in opposition to seriousness, morality and productive work, and their attendant social relations. Rather, in encouraging the geographical aspects of play alongside the playful aspects of geography, we would welcome papers that approach the ludic from diverse disciplinary, theoretical and methodological positions.

Themes may include, but are not limited to:

• Playful approaches to well being
• Playful approaches to environmental thinking and action
• States of play: geopolitics, securitization, war gaming
• Digital and networked play
• The place of the ludic in anticipatory and utopian thought
• The relation of the senses and/or vitality to play
• Psychoanalysis and play
• Toys and transitional objects
• The role of the ludic in cultivating modes of ethical generosity and/or responsiveness
• Experimentation with rules, roles and meaning
• The philosophical kinship of play and critique
• Play as a form of political praxis
• Playful research practices
• Engagements with the irrational/more-than-rational

If you are interested in submitting a paper to any of these sessions, please contact the session organisers as soon as possible. The final list of papers and abstracts will  to be submitted to the RGS by the 31st of January 2012.

General Information

Space constraints mean the RGS/IBG annual conference in Edinburgh will be smaller than in past years. The RGS organisers have therefore decided to place the following temporary constraints on the 2012 conference:

• an individual may not normally make more than two substantive contributions to the conference programme (this includes paper presentation, panel member, discussant);
• a session may not normally occupy more than two timeslots in the conference programme;
• a Research Group may only sponsor sessions up to a total of 12 timeslots across the conference programme, including sole and joint sponsored sessions;
• Skype or other distance presentations cannot be supported at AC2012

For more details see www.rgs.org/AC2012Participation

SCGRG sponsorship

The SCGRG is looking to sponsor 12 high quality and innovative sessions across the range of work in social and cultural geography. Sponsorship can help brand your session in the conference programme, allow us to promote the session through our communication networks, and enable you to apply for one of our 6 Research Group guest passes.

We would like to suggest the smaller number of SCGRG sessions at the conference will be a positive opportunity to build discussions within and across this community of researchers.  There will be no social and cultural geography sponsored slots scheduled against each other.  We are thus asking session proposals to consider intellectual themes, innovative formats and substantive topics that will be of maximum interest across the SCGRG membership.  We are looking to sponsor a number of sessions that speak directly to the conference theme.  We are also interested in other high quality contributions to contemporary research in social and cultural geography.  We would encourage all members to explore innovative ways of making use of the space and time available in sessions.

If you are interested in submitting a proposal for sponsorship from the SCGRG, please use this form to send us the details of your session.  The deadline for submissions is 21.11.11. committee will review the applications as promptly as possible after this date.

The SCGRG is a large group and each year we receive more proposals than we can support.  Given the additional pressures this year, we’d encourage you to explore the full range of research groups which are accepting proposals, and also remind you there is a process of submitting sessions outside of research group sponsorship.

We look forward to your ideas for sessions and we’ll be posting more SCGRG plans for pre-conference activities here soon.

Gail Davies and Russell Hitchings