Call For Papers
AAG 2017 Boston (April 5-8, 2017)
Session title: Practical pragmatism: Towards a ‘post-critical’ urban political geography?
Organizers: Laura Cesafsky, University of Minnesota
Ryan Holifield, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee
We are seeing a ‘slow turn’ towards pragmatism across political geography, evidenced by a growing interest in American philosophical figures like Dewey, Peirce and James. A 2008 Geoforum special issue on ‘Pragmatism and Geography’ was an early touchstone (Wood & Smith 2008). Contributors unearthed an array of themes of possible value in this unwieldy tradition that the Italian futurist Giovanni Papini described as ‘lying in the midst of our theories, like a corridor in a hotel’ (cited in James, 1907). In his contribution to the special issue, for example, Jones (2008) cited “the primacy of life and action, pluralism, materiality/spatiality/temporality/relationality, anti-essentialism, creativity, collectivity, fallibilism, and disorder in method” as possible pragmatic contributions to geography.
We fear the scope of these discovered (potential) uses may have had the unintended effect of dulling conversation around pragmatism rather than enlivening it. In other words, we fear that geographers have not been pragmatic enough about pragmatism, moving by habit toward first principles and ‘metaphysical ground-maps’ (Cutchin 2008) rather than doing what pragmatists insist we must: start from the practical problems that face us and emphasize the practical application of the knowledge we make. To that end, in this session we invite papers that turn to pragmatic ideas in an effort to overcome concrete impasses in (urban) geographical thought and practice. We identify three ‘urban geographical obstacles’ for debate that are actually motivating the turn to pragmatism among scholars today (and we welcome additional problems from contributors to the session):
1) The problem of politics. What counts? There is dissatisfaction in urban geography with the limits of ‘post-political’ and Marxian theories that specify too much, obscuring the diverse processes by which knowledges, desires, and claims are constructed. On the other hand, the idea that ‘everything is political’ or that politics is identical with the composition of the common world is equally dissatisfying. Geographers are turning to pragmatism (Holifield & Schuelke 2015; Bridge 2014; Barnett & Bridge 2013; Agnew 2011) in order to define a politics between these poles [and in-step with Latour (2013), who has turned to Dewey to ‘autocorrect’ his own composition-as-politics problem].
2) The problem of critique. How to move past it? Braun (2015) and Woodyer and Geoghagen (2013) speculate about a ‘post-critical’ political ecology. Might the same happen in urban geography? Critical urban theory has helped us understand the production of space and the uneven distribution of social goods, but pragmatism insists that experimentation is necessary to gain knowledge and create new forms of urban life and politics. Geographers debate actually-existing experimentalism in cities (Bulkeley et. al year; Evans et. al 2016). But what of experimentalism as research practice, as widely discussed (Last 2012; Harney et. al 2016) and rarely modeled (but see Whatmore 2013)—a practice that alters conditions and examines the results, allows new normativities to emerge, and makes researchers less paranoid and detached and more embroiled and open to surprise (Sedgwick 1997)?
3) The problem of democracy. What makes democratic action possible? Related to the problem of critique, the prevailing mode of democratic research among critical geographers is the unmasking of betrayals and contradictions. Pragmatism offers an account of democracy as a distributed, experimental practice of working on the issues that affect us (Lake 2016). Geographers and other social scientists are working through the problem of how to actualize democratic life by examining how things/issues/problems/settings/affects compel thought and engagement, as well as how publics can be constituted through the design of participatory apparatuses (Berlant 2011; Holden et. al 2013; Marres 2013; Latour & Weibel 2005; DiSalvo 2009; Healey 2012).
We invite papers that deal with these themes or with the broad question: What does it mean to do practical—i.e. pragmatic—politics and (urban) geographical research; why have geographers traditionally resisted the injunction to be practical (whatever that means); and what impasses have presented themselves that compel us to lift the injunction now?
We are especially interested in papers on:
+ Practicality, instrumentality, and geography
+ Democracy and pragmatism
+ The production of democratic subjectivities and publics
+ Interfaces between American pragmatism and the pragmatic sociology of critique
+ Critique and ‘post-critique’
+ Thought and action
+ Pragmatic politics and post-politics
+ Issues, problems and things as ‘forcers’ of political thought and practice
+ Experimentation in urban politics
+ Experimentation as a critical research practice
+ Cities as pragmatic entities
+ Consequentialism as method
We invite interested participants to send their title and 300-word abstract to Laura Cesafsky (cesafsky@gmail.com) and Ryan Holifield (holifiel@uwm.edu) by October 15th.
References:
Agnew, J. (2011) Waterpower: Politics and the geography of water provision. Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 101(3), 463-476.
Berlant, L. G. (2011) Cruel optimism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Barnett, C. & G. Bridge (2013) Geographies of radical democracy: Agonistic pragmatism and the formation of affected interests. Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 103(4): 1022-1040.
Braun, B. (2015) From critique to experiment?: Rethinking political ecology for the Anthropocene. The Routledge Handbook of Political Ecology: 102-114.
Bridge, G. (2014) On Marxism, pragmatism and critical urban studies. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 38(5), 1644-1659.
Bulkeley, H. & V. Castán Broto (2013) Government by experiment? Global cities and the governing of climate change. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 38(3): 361-375.
Cutchin, M. (2008) John Dewey’s metaphysical ground-map and its implications for geographical inquiry. Geoforum 39(4): 1555-1569.
DiSalvo, C. (2009) Design and the construction of publics. Design Issues 25(1): 48-63.
Donaldson, A., S. Lane, N. Ward, S. & Whatmore (2013) Overflowing with issues: following the political trajectories of flooding. Environment and Planning C: Government and Policy 31(4): 603-618.
Evans, J., A. Karvonen & R. Raven (eds.) (2016) The Experimental City. New York: Routledge.
Harney, L., J. McCurry, J. Scott, & J. Wills (2016) Developing ‘process pragmatism’ to underpin engaged research in human geography. Progress in Human Geography: 40(3), 316-333.
Healey, P. (2012) Re-enchanting democracy as a mode of governance. Critical Policy Studies 6(1): 19-39.
Holden, M., A. Scerri, & C. Owens (2013) More publics, more problems: The productive interface between the pragmatic sociology of critique and Deweyan pragmatism. Contemporary Pragmatism 10(2): 1-24.
Holifield, R. & N. Schuelke (2015) The place and time of the political in urban political ecology: Contested imaginations of a river’s future. Annals of the Association of American Geographers 105(2): 294-303.
James, W. (1907/1975) Pragmatism (Vol. 1). Boston, MA: Harvard University Press.
Jones, O. (2008) Stepping from the wreckage: Geography, pragmatism, and anti-representational theory. Geoforum 39(4): 1600-1612.
Lake, R. (2016) Urban Geography Plenary Lecture: On Poetry, Pragmatism, and Urban Possibility of Creative Democracy. AAG Annual Meeting, San Francisco, CA.
Last, A. (2012) Experimental geographies. Geography Compass 6(12): 706-724.
Latour, B. (2013) An Inquiry into Modes of Existence. Boston, MA: Harvard University Press.
Latour, B. & Weibel, P. (2005) Making things public: atmospheres of democracy.
Marres, N. (2013) Why political ontology must be experimentalized: On ecoshowhomes as devices of participation. Social studies of Science 43(3): 417-443.
Sedgwick, E. K. (1997) Paranoid reading and reparative reading, or you’re so paranoid, you probably think this essay is about you. In: Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity: 123-152.
Whatmore, S. (2013) Earthly powers and affective environments: An ontological politics of flood risk. Theory, Culture and Society 30 (7–8): 33–50.
Wood, N. & S. Smith (eds.) (2008) Themed issue: Pragmatism and geography. Geoforum 39(4): 1517-1636.
Woodyear, T. & H. Geoghagen (2013) (Re)enchanting geography? The nature of being critical and the character of critique in human geography. Progress in Human Geography 37(2): 195-214