‘For Love of the World’ – Arendt, politics, space

 Convener: Richard J Bater  (Royal Holloway, Universityof London)
 

Sponsored by the Political Geography Research Group of the Royal Geographical Society with theInstitute ofBritish Geographers

RGS-IBG Annual Conference, Edinburgh University – 3-5^th July, 2012

Elisabeth Young-Bruehl (to whom the title of this session is indebted), in her biography of Hannah Arendt, notes her recurrent concern for ‘the world’, after Martin Heidegger, as well as her contemporary experiences of worldliness and worldlessness, – questions that geographers too have long concerned themselves with – at the very basis of her political thought.  There are glimmers too, of a sophisticated conception of the space(s) of politics and the production of space pregnant within Arendt’s works.  In ‘To Save the Jewish Homeland’ (1948), for example, we find Arendt’s anti-transcendental conception of the political and identity, as a critique of European nationalism, to inform her own contributions to the debate on what future spatial expression a Zionist politics might take.

Questions concerning identity, nationalism, authority, power, violence, ‘the event’, expertise, have too received sustained attention by geographers during recent years, but rarely with more than tacit acknowledgment to Arendt’s influential contributions on these questions.  This session seeks to draw-out such fleeting references, and place these diverse contributions into dialogue. How might, or how has, a geographical predilection, in thinking-through the histories and geographies of such crucial questions, take(n) Arendt’s diverse contributions to political thought in new directions?  In what ways can Arendt contribute to understandings of space and its constitution?   In the spirit of the conference theme we might think as much about ‘space’ as a nexus of geographical thought, as geography-as-discipline itself as historically orientated toward the study of space ‘for love of the world’.

The session invites diverse contributions that run with and against Arendt’s work on the following themes:

• Space and political subjectification
• Arendt and the space in-between
• Territory and territoriality
•  The state and boundaries/bordering practices
•  Spaces of authoritarianism, totalitarianism, despotism
•  Geopolitics
•  (Geo)politics of Zionism
•  The conquest of space and the (geo)politics of verticality
•  Security and securitisation
• Government, bureaucracy, and automation
• Spaces of politics/anti-politics
• Scientific truth and the space(s) of politics
• Arendt and the geographical proposal
• Geographical re-presentation and the ‘art of storytelling’
• Geographers and the conquest of space
• Public/private
• Sensing in common and the common world
• The ‘event’
• The ‘social’
• Action, freedom, and the production of space
• Citizenship, Nationalism, transnationalism
•  Migration: worlds, worldliness, and worldlessness

The session will be composed of up to five presentations of fifteen minutes each,  followed by 25 minutes Q & A.

Please send abstracts of 300 words (maximum) to Richard Bater (richard.bater.2010@live.rhul.ac.uk) by 20th^th January 2011.