Progressive Geographies

Call for Papers RGS IBG Annual International Conference 2015: Dialectical Geographies

Session organiser: Camilla Royle, Department of Geography, King’s College London

Dialectical methodologies call for an engagement with dynamism, change, development, antagonism, contradiction and totality. Critical geographers from various backgrounds have described their work as dialectical. Ed Soja (1980) thus referred to the socio-spatial dialectic; Andy Merrifield, in a somewhat different vein has developed a dialectical approach to urban studies influenced by the work of Bertell Ollman amongst others. Elsewhere, Paul Robbins includes a section on dialectics as methodology in his critical introduction to Political Ecology (2012) and dialectics served  as the subject of a special issue ofEnvironment and Planning A in 2008. David Harvey, in Justice, Nature and the Geography of Difference(1996), lists 11 attributes of dialectics, calling for an approach that sees the world as constituted by diverse and contradictory processes rather than by things that could be considered in isolation.

But the meaning of dialectics is itself inherently hard to grasp and open to multiple reworkings and interpretations, the playwright Bertolt Brecht once remarked that he had never found “anybody without a sense of humour who could understand dialectics”. Dialectics has been interpreted as a set of ideas or laws about how the world works but is arguably more relevant for understanding a world in which the observer also acts and changes the world around them. This session seeks to consider the status of contemporary dialectical geographies by asking, for example, whether a dialectical methodology can help understand the implications of the anthropocene? Beyond this, it will ask whether dialectics might open up new avenues of geographical enquiry and, indeed, whether it is useful or not to describe geographical work as dialectical?

Papers of 15-20 minutes each are invited on the broad theme of geographical dialectics. Papers might address but are not limited to:

·         Comments on dialectics as a theory or methodology

·         Dialectics, class struggle and political practice

·         Opportunities for, and uses of, dialectics as a methodology in geography in considering questions of space, place and scale, human-environment relations, identity and oppression and so on

·         Interdisciplinary engagements: Dialectics in the arts, humanities and natural sciences and the implications for geography

·         Critiques and transformations of dialectics

The 2015 annual conference will take place at the University of Exeter, UK from 1st-4th September. The conference theme this year is “geographies of the anthropocene”

Please submit a paper title, an abstract of up to 300 words and a brief biography to camilla.royle@kcl.ac.uk (those selected are expected to cover their own costs). Please also feel free to get in touch with questions or suggestions.

Timeline:

·         Deadline for submission of abstracts: 9^th February 2015

·         Responses from session convenor by: 13^th February 2015.

·         The session convenor will communicate the RGS response as soon as informed by the organisers after the RGS 20^th February deadline.