AAG Annual Meeting, 21-25 April 2015 – Chicago, Illinois
Call for Papers: Pedagogies of Peace-Building, Democracy and Development
Organizers: Lynn Staeheli and David Jones Marshall (Durham University)
Sponsored by the Political Geography Specialty Group
In societies riven by division, conflict, and violence, young people represent both a shining hope for a more peaceful future, and the fear of a return to war. The distance of the “new generation” from old conflicts opens the possibility for building more just societies, or at least societies in which conflict is reduced. As such, young people are often the targets of various “post-conflict transition” efforts that seek to build non-conflictual ways of being and belonging, and that mobilise democracy and development in those efforts. These efforts, however, are deeply contested, especially in societies recovering from conflict and division.
Some commentators and practitioners, however, argue that, in an effort to sidestep conflict, peace building projects may seek to avoid political questions about the root causes of violence, questions about rights and justice, and contested narratives of the conflict, in favor of functionalist approaches that strive for building everyday interpersonal tolerance and coexistence, often under the guise of citizenship. In doing so, peace-building efforts operate within a particular logic that forecloses questions about what peace and citizenship actually mean to young people living in divided societies. The purpose of this session is to open these questions to critical examination, and to unpack the coupling of peace education and citizenship promotion as it is so often mobilized in post-conflict settings.
This session seeks to bring together recent critical scholarship within geography examining the politics of peace and peacebuilding (Koopman 2011; Williams and McConnell 2012; Megoan, McConnell and Williams 2014), research on multicultural and cosmopolitan citizenship education (Mitchell 2003; Pykett 2010; Staeheli and Hammett 2013), and recent work on the geographies of knowledge and learning (McFarlane 2011). We invite papers that critically examine the spatial and temporal politics of peace-building as a form of citizenship formation, and citizenship promotion as a mode of peace building. This may include research on topics such as: the role of international NGOs and donor governments in peace building and citizenship promotion; transnational circulation of peace pedagogies; the scales and sites of peace/citizenship; how and where young people “learn” peace or violence; the reproduction of violence and peace in everyday spaces and practices; the gender and age politics of peace building and citizenship promotion; the potential epistemic violence of peace education; among others.
Please send your abstracts to david.marshall@durham.ac.uk by 20 October 2014.