2 x Assistant Professor vacancies

UNIVERSITY COLLEGE LONDON

The Department of Science, Technology, Engineering and Public Policy (UCL STeaPP), is now recruiting two assistant professors to join its growing team and collaborate with the UCL City Leadership Initiative, a joint effort of UN-Habitat, University College London and World Bank based at UCL STEaPP. Two positions are now open with deadline on 3 January 2016 for posts as:

Lecturer in Urban Governance

UCL STEaPP is seeking an innovative scholar working on urban governance, especially in relation to the mobilisation of knowledge within urban policy, to join the department as a Lecturer on or before July 2016.

The successful applicant will join a dynamic and growing department, within a world leading research university, uniquely focused on the mobilisation of science and engineering knowledge for policy, and the use of policy to advance science and engineering for society. Lectures within STEaPP help lead the development and delivery of the department’s expanding teaching, research and policy engagement programmes. This is an exciting opportunity for emerging and entrepreneurial scholars to develop a reputation in these areas.

The department welcomes candidates with a PhD and track record of relevant scholarship in either the natural or social sciences. The topical focus can be on any aspect of urban governance or policy, and incorporate any domain(s) of science, engineering and/or technology. A focus on some aspect of the interaction, circulation or city networking of scientific/engineering knowledge with urban policy, and/or of the role of technology in urban governance, is a distinct plus. The department also has a preference for research/teaching foci that relate explicitly to urban experiences within the Global South and emerging countries.

Further particulars here.

Lecturer in Urban Analytics

UCL STEaPP is seeking an innovative scholar working on the application of scientific analyses and/or models to support public decision-making in cities to join the department as a Lecturer on or before July 2016.

The successful applicant will join a dynamic and growing department, within a world leading research university, uniquely focused on the mobilisation of science and engineering knowledge for policy, and the use of policy to advance science and engineering for society. Lecturers within STEaPP help lead the development and delivery of the departments expanding teaching, research and policy engagement programmes. This is an exciting opportunity for emerging and entrepreneurial scholars to develop a reputation in these areas.

The department welcomes candidates with a PhD and track record of relevant scholarship in either the natural or social sciences. The topical focus can be on any aspect of urban analytics, and incorporate any domain(s) of science, engineering and/or technology. A focus on some aspect of the interaction between the scientific analyses with decision-making in cities is essential, and there is a preference for foci that relate to urban experiences within the Global South and emerging countries.

Further particulars here.

Below, some information about a panel on land struggles, dispossession, community ties and the conflict in Colombia. Alexander Huezo, the organizer, is looking for more people to present at this panel (there are four-five presenters but there is space for, at least, two more). You can contact him atadhuezo@gmail.com or you can reply to this message. The deadline to edit the panel (and include more people) is December 2nd

Thanks

Dear Alexander D. Huezo, Congratulations on a successful submission of your session to the 2016 Annual Meeting, San Francisco, California. Your session details are as follows:

Please note: Submitted sessions must use all 100 minutes of allotted time. For paper sessions that do not use the full 100 minutes, additional presentations may be added after the submission deadline to complete the time. You may return to the submission console to edit your session if you wish.

Call for Papers: AAG Annual Meeting, San Francisco, CA, 29 March – 2 April 2016

Session Title: Shifting the Frontiers of Eurasia

Call for Papers: Association of American Geographers (AAG) Annual Meeting, March 29-April 2, 2016, San Francisco, CA

Point, Line, Plane, Volume: Increasing Dimensionality in Geographic Inquiry

Session Organizers: Katherine Sammler (University of Arizona), Audra El Vilaly (University of Arizona)

Sponsor: Political Geography Specialty Group

Improvements in technology along with expanding territories of capital investment make it important to recognize that previous theorizations in geography have largely considered space and territory in two dimensions. Recent scholarship calls for the extension of theoretical and empirical inquiry to include the third spatial dimension of verticality and volumes. Contributions to these efforts include research on oceans (Steinberg and Peters 2015), subterranean spaces (Braun 2000; Weizman 2002; Elden 2013a, 2013b), airspace (Williams 2013), and outer space (MacDonald 2007). These volumes have been considered, respectively, as spaces of fluidity and continual reformation, as the hidden, invisible or imperceptible, as spaces of military power and surveillance, and as the final capitalist frontier. This session seeks to expound on conversations of the material, political, legal and social assemblages that construct these voluminous spaces as three-dimensional terrains of historical, contemporary, and future human activities. This includes how bodies are moved, replaced or stretched – spatially, temporally and technologically – towards different sites, territories, and regimes of governance.

Expanding the conceptualization of territory from areas to volumes and from surfaces to cubes, spheres and columns of height and depth produces a need to rethink the politics of space, in particular the techniques for asserting power over and within volumetric spaces. Thus securing the material and affective dimensions of verticality necessarily forces a reorientation and renegotiation of power relations, property rights regimes, legal apparatuses, financial calculations of transmuting volume into value, cartographic representations, and other technologies of governance (Bridge 2013; Elden 2013a). In this session, we expand the concepts of verticality and volumetric territory beyond the realm of exceptional, securitized, and militarized spaces, previously the predominant focus of this scholarship. We are particularly interested in the applications of and implications for rethinking space and place as vertical and voluminous through the occupation, regulation, and exploitation of bodies, objects, and territories such as via GPS tracking, satellite surveillance, on and off-shore resource extraction, on and off-planet mining, regulation of atmosphere, and privatization of space travel. We welcome conceptual, theoretical, and empirically based papers.

If you are interested in presenting a paper in this session, please submit a title and abstract (up to 250 words) to Katherine Sammler (ksammler@email.arizona.edu) and Audra El Vilaly (audra@email.arizona.edu) by Monday, November 16, 2015.

References:

Adey, P. 2013. Securing the volume/volume: Comments on Stuart Elden’s Plenary paper ‘Secure the volume’. Political Geography 34: 52-54.
Braun, B. 2000. Producing vertical territory: Geology and governmentality in late Victorian Canada. Ecumene 7(1): 7-46.
Bridge, G. 2013. Territory, now in 3D! Political Geography 34: 55-57.
Deleuze, G. and F. Guattari. 1987. A thousand plateaus: Capitalism and schizophrenia. University of Minnesota Press: Minneapolis.
Elden, S. 2013a. Secure the volume: Vertical geopolitics and the depth of power. Political Geography 34: 35-51.
Elden, S. 2013b. Bodies, books, beneath: A reply to Adey and Bridge. Political Geography 34: 58-59.
MacDonald, F. 2007. Anti-Astropolitik– outer space and the orbit of geography. Progress in Human Geography 31(5): 592-615.
Scott, H.V. 2008. Colonialism, landscape and the subterranean. Geography Compass 2 (6): 1853-1869.
Steinberg, P. and K. Peters. 2015. Wet ontologies, fluid spaces: Giving depth to volume through oceanic thinking. Environment and Planning D: Society  

and Space 33: 247-264.
Weizman, E. 2002. Introduction to the politics of verticality. https://www.opendemocracy.net/ecology-politicsverticality/article_801.jsp
Williams, A.J. 2013. Re-orientating vertical geopolitics. Geopolitics 18: 225-246.

CfP: Dimensions of Political Ecology 2016

Illicit Agricultures and Natures

Session title: “Geo-economics: geographer’s innovation in economics“

Session Convenors: Balázs Forman (Department of Economic Geography and Future Studies, Corvinus University of Budapest)

Description:

In many regions of the World, very serious socio-territorial changes are currently happening in non-core areas. As in other parts of the world, most development in Latin America, in Central Europe, or in East Asia is. recently peripheral and differs from ‘classical’ economic development in North Atlantic countries.
One characteristic of recent economic development is the high dependency and/or interdependence on core countries and on world market.
Other characteristic of recent economic development is the high dependency and/or interdependence on natural and environmental resources and climate change.
How we can focuse our attention for changes are caused by climate change if interests of the all countries are high level fragmented? If the economic growth and economic development needs for some countries to solve the different challenges of ageing population, to sustain systems of the education, the public services, the pension, the public health with changing population and growing inequalities.
The key terms are the ineqaulity, sustainability and welfare allocation and/or distribution between different individuals, social groups, regions, countries and generations. We examine, how can adapt the  European Union’s solutions in some area in frame of the World. For example, EU 15 burden sharing on CO2 emissions in use of Kyoto Protocol.
The peripherial and semi-peripherial countries in the vicinity of economic growth hubs are changing rapidly. However, peripheries of world economy are not only affected by the geographical expansion of their role in spatial division of labour leading to dispersed forms of economic development in the core-periphery connection.
In a general sense, it seems that semi-peripherial countries are becoming a more central arena under neoliberal capitalism in World economy, leading to spatial reconfigurations as well as social, ecological and economic disruptions. We have to face dichotomy of stability- instability and short and long term periods.
However, up to now, much existing work has focused on economic development of North America and Europe, while systematized reflections on developments in Latin America, in Central Europe and etc. have been underrepresented.
Moreover, the developments in between the developed and undeveloped worlds may require a re-thinking of existing approaches to understand the role of the spatial in one hand in current modes of capital accumulation and in other hand in effect of climate vhange.
For instance, there has been interaction between economic geography, development geography and geography and economics of different world regions  and those studying the political economy, while both could benefit from each other.
This book to discuss the natures, causes, consequences, and politics of the dynamics taking place in peripheries and semi-peripheries of World economy, in order to enhance our understanding of the role of these spaces for current processes of neoliberal development.

We search for answer the following questions:
•      What are the characteristics of current changes in the peripherial and semi-peripherial countries or regions, and (how) do they differ from processes of economic growth and development of core countries?
•      How do these changes relate to current modes of capital accumulation, such as the increasing importance of effects of climate change?
•      What makes these spaces special and attractive for new forms of commodification?
•      What are the social, ecological and economic effects of the new spatial division of labour and/or configurations?
•      How does development in the periphery interrelate with technical change?
•      How is it linked to the commodification of nature and a re-distribution of access to natural resources and their benefits?
•      Are peripherial spaces also new arenas of resistance to globalization?

Please send your abstract of not more than 250 words to the session convenors, balazs.forman@uni-corvinus.hu by November 2nd, 2015.

Williams, A.J. 2013. Re-orientating vertical geopolitics. Geopolitics 18: 225-246.