2nd CALL FOR PAPERS
AAG Annual Meeting, New Orleans, 10-14 April 2018
Pragmatism in Geography: Between Objectivity and Affect Lies Social Hope
Organizer: Robert W. Lake, Rutgers University (rlake@rutgers.edu)
Sponsored by:
Urban Geography; Political Geography; Ethics, Justice & Human Rights; Socialist & Critical Geography Specialty Groups
How can geography discern a path toward betterment of the human condition? Several well-worn paths toward this goal have encountered the limitations of their presuppositions. The quest for objective representation of an external truth, bequeathed from the Enlightenment, has deteriorated variously into authoritarian modernism (Scott, 1999); the tyranny and hubris of expertise (Mitchell, 2002); the retreat into abstraction and theorization (Harman, 2014); or the deceptive comfort of conceptual validation through ideological purity (Rorty, 1982, 1991). The encounter with affect has, from a different direction, too often descended into egocentric fascination with auto-ethnography or the self-affirming seductions of sentimentality and “consolatory distraction” (Nelson, 2017). Both objectivity and affect flounder as revelatory strategies when confronted with the complexity, unpredictability, and indeterminacy of the social world (Rogers, 2009). Faced with the evacuation of teleological certainty-a reliable route linking means to ends-how can geographers identify a practice of knowledge production conducive to social hope?
This session seeks to explore the possibilities of philosophical pragmatism as an approach to praxis that evades the pitfalls of earlier orthodoxies. As exemplified in the voluminous writings of John Dewey (e.g., 1929, 1948), pragmatism abjures the rigidity of foundational principles and theorization from abstraction while recognizing contingency, relationality, experimentalism, and the validation of knowledge through practice. Papers are invited that consider any aspect of pragmatism as an approach to discerning a path to, in Dewey’s words, “achieving a better kind of life to be lived.”
Please send abstracts (max. 250 words) by October 9, 2017 to Bob Lake (rlake@rutgers.edu).
References
Dewey, John. 1929. The Quest for Certainty. G.P. Putnam.
Dewey, John. 1948. Reconstruction in Philosophy. Dover.
Harman, Graham. 2014. Bruno Latour: Reassembling the Political. London: Pluto Press.
Mitchell, Timothy. 2002. Rule of Experts. University of California Press.
Nelson, Deborah. 2017. Tough Enough: Arbus, Arendt, Didion, McCarthy, Sontag, Weil. University of Chicago Press.
Rogers, Melvin. 2009. The Undiscovered Dewey: Religion, Morality, and the Ethos of Democracy. Columbia University Press.
Rorty, Richard. 1982. Consequences of Pragmatism. University of Minnesota Press.
Rorty, Richard. 1991. Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth. Cambridge University Press.
Rorty, Richard. 1999. Philosophy and Social Hope. Penguin Books.
Scott, James. 1999. Seeing Like a State. Yale University Press.