Landscape Studies is multidisciplinary, with a diverse array of approaches that give the field its strength. The Landscape, Space and Place (LSP) Conference is in its 12th year of bringing together scholars across various disciplinary backgrounds and from different stages of their careers. At this conference, all scholars interested in the widely varied interpretations and analyses of landscape are invited to join in the exchange of ideas and consideration of novel intellectual perspectives, to join in the effort of building a more integrative framework for the field.
We are open to many interpretations of Landscape, Space, and Place. Some previous papers and sessions have dealt with the following approaches:
*Geographies of film culture and exhibition
*Digital landscapes, mapping, and geo-caching
*Global conflict, borders, and nationalism
*Queer spaces, gendered places, and visual culture
*Whiteness and racialized landscapes
*Archaeology and landscape history
*Visual culture and media studies
*Tourism, post-colonialism, and boundary crossing
*Emplacement, displacement, and hybridity
*Environmental landscapes and politics
*Migration, geographies of everyday life
*Animal and post-human geographies
*Architecture and theories of design
*Photography and documentary studies
*Soundscapes, sound studies, and sonar
*Literary Geographies, text(ile)ual spaces, contexts
*Embodiment and the politics of scale
Potential questions to address include but are not limited to:
How do landscapes shape dynamics of power and how do these power structures in turn shape landscapes? *What are the relationships between spaces and cultural and artistic practices? *How can places influence conceptualizations of citizenship and political involvement? *What are some of the contemporary or historical ways of representing and experiencing space? *What are some of the ways of circulating and reproducing notions of place?
Information and Guidelines for Submission:
The LSP conference will feature workshop panels of 3-4 people presenting papers related to a general theme. Presenters should prepare 10-12 minute presentations that will be followed by a 15-20 minute Q/A. Papers may include a variety of multimedia aids. Along with typical PowerPoint paper presentations, past conferences have included landscape architecture panels, artistic installations, hands-on demonstrations, and film screenings. Such creative project submissions are also welcome and can be accommodated. Please notify the coordinators of your particular needs in the email which accompanies your abstract submission.

For any type of submission please include: a written abstract of 250-300 words, five (5) keywords to describe your project, and list two (2) bibliographic references. Submissions are due by January 31, 2018. Please submit abstracts to iulandscapeconference.wordpress.com/abstract-submission If you have any questions, feel free to contact us at IUlandscapeconference@gmail.com.
Conference Committee: Beth Ciaravolo (chair) and Abdul Aijaz

POLLEN18: Political Ecology, the Green Economy, and Alternative Sustainabilities

Oslo, Norway

June 20-22, 2018

Session organizers: Catherine Windey (University of Antwerp), Vijay Kolinjivadi (Université du Québec en Outaouais), Gert Van Hecken (University of Antwerp), and Elizabeth Shapiro-Garza (Duke University)

 

Over the last two decades, market-based instruments (MBIs) for nature conservation have become increasingly prominent in environmental and development policy discourse as a so-called win-win solution. While there is no consensual definition of MBIs and they encompasses heterogeneous types of programmes that do not always use markets in their conception and implementation, a utilitarian rationale and the use of financial incentives remain central elements of their design (Pirard, 2012). Therefore, beyond the material outcomes of MBIs and regardless of actual commodification or marketization processes taking place, much of the critical scholarship on MBIs denounces this overarching rationale as part of a hegemonic neoliberal governmentality that primarily serves the capitalist agenda. Accordingly, this form of environmental management would lead to a detrimental modification of socio-ecological relations through the promotion of productivist/individualistic socio-cultural attitudes towards the environment at the cost of more intrinsic motivations (e.g. Brockington and Duffy, 2010; Büscher et al., 2012; Castree, 2003; Corbera, 2012; Fletcher and Büscher, 2017; McAfee, 2012; Sullivan, 2006; Van Hecken and Bastiaensen, 2010). At the same time, an increasing number of empirical studies have also shown precisely how these dominant narratives behind MBIs are constructed, contested and (re)negotiated at multiple levels (e.g. Benjaminsen, 2014; Büscher, 2014; den Besten et al., 2013; Evans et al., 2014; Leggett and Lovell, 2012; McElwee, 2014; Milne and Adams, 2012; Pasgaard, 2015; Shapiro-Garza, 2013a, 2013b; Van Hecken et al. 2015a). In fact, these models do not necessarily unfold on the ground as intended and rather result in a hybridization between different worldviews, everyday practices and ways of valuing ‘nature’ through actors’ agency and power relationships (Cleaver, 2012; Van Hecken et al., 2015b).

While it is important to critically examine the ideologies and power structures underlying MBIs along with micro scale analysis (e.g. Fletcher & Büscher, 2017), we argue that these debates often remain somewhat trapped within binary frames between the ‘global’ and the ‘local’, ‘market’ and ‘no market’, ‘capitalist’ and ‘non-capitalist’, ‘resistance’ and ‘consent’, that still convey the idea of an imposition of the global neoliberal/capitalist economy to powerless non-capitalist local communities and agents (Gibson-Graham, 2002; Hart, 2006). Individual agents and communities hence appear as a “site of economic impact and never as a constituent of the economic” (St Martin, 2006: 182) which conveys the idea that there is an a priori structural power, i.e. neoliberalism, and an a posteriori agency/actor that is always the site of its hegemonic impact. Through this lens, the tendency is to dismiss theory-practice entanglements and various human-nature relationalities and discursive formations that continuously emerge, but which fall outside of these dialectic ontologies, hence paradoxically risking reinforcing a neoliberal performative act “that limits our political imaginations and sense of agency” (Burke and Shear, 2014: 129; Kolinjivadi et al., 2017). Crucially, these outcomes are not framed as alternatives in response to an imposition by the hegemonic tendencies of neoliberalism or a capitalist economy. Instead, they emerge as theory-practice entanglements, consciously or unconsciously, in relation to a muddle of ideologies, social norms, power relations, actors’ agencies, path dependencies and geographic scales (Van Hecken et al., 2017).

 

To further challenge conventional discursive polarizations and to enlighten and rethink diverse identities and practices (Gibson-Graham, 2002), we believe that the analysis of how so-called MBIs are formed and then enact, are (re)informed and contested in interaction with hybrid socio-ecological configurations is a crucial area of exploration. In other words, examining these programmes in praxis requires a stronger relational understanding of humans-in-nature and nature-in-humanity in order to ground MBI design and implementation within historical and often unruly geographical conditions. We are therefore interested in bringing together a collection of presentations that look at the dynamic processes of MBIs’ (re)configuration that can potentially shape the formation of a new episteme. We thus invite conceptual, theoretical and empirical contributions that consider but are not limited to the topics below:

 

• ‘Politics of knowledge’: performativity of policy and academic discourses on MBIs; theory-practice entanglements; how discourses are constructed and translated into practice;
• Diverse and historically-situated values, institutions, agencies, knowledge practices, skills and traditions related to natural resources management and how they interact with MBIs’ as narrative and practice;
• Dynamics of power (e.g. ‘power-knowledge’, access and use of natural resources, etc.), role of the State and unruly green governmentalitiessurrounding MBIs;
• Going beyond capital-logics as imposed from above: contingent human-nature histories as debunking neoliberalism’s so-called “success”.

 

Please send abstracts of no more than 300 words to catherine.windey@uantwerpen.be before 6 December 2017. Feel free to contact us should you have any questions or ideas about this session. If accepted to this paper session, applicants will still need to register through the POLLEN website.

 

References

 

Benjaminsen, G. 2014. Between Resistance and Consent: Project–Village Relationships When Introducing REDD+ in Zanzibar. Forum for Development Studies, 41, 377-398.

Brockington, D., and Duffy, R. 2010. Capitalism and Conservation: The Production and Reproduction of Biodiversity Conservation. Antipode 42(3), 469-484.

Büscher, B. 2012. Payments for ecosystem services as neoliberal conservation: (Reinterpreting) evidence from the Maloti-Drakensberg, South Africa. Conservation & Society, 10, 29-41.

Büscher, B., Sullivan, S., Neves, K., Igoe, J. & Brockington, D. 2012. Towards a Synthesized Critique of Neoliberal Biodiversity Conservation. Capitalism Nature Socialism, 23, 4-30.

Büscher, B. 2014. Selling Success: Constructing Value in Conservation and Development. World Development, 57, 79-90.

Burke, B. & Shear, B. 2014. Introduction: engaged scholarship for non-capitalist political ecologies. Journal of Political Ecology, 21, 127-144.

Castree, N. 2003. Commodifying what nature? Progress in Human Geography, 27, 273-297.

Cleaver, F. 2012. Development as Bricolage. London: Earthscan.

Corbera, E. 2012. Problematizing REDD+ as an experiment in payments for ecosystem services. Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability, 4, 612-619.

den Besten, J. W., Arts, B. & Verkooijen, P. 2014. The evolution of REDD+: An analysis of discursive-institutional dynamics. Environmental Science & Policy, 35, 40-48.

Evans, K., Murphy, L. & de Jong, W. 2014. Global versus local narratives of REDD: A case study from Peru’s Amazon. Environmental Science & Policy, 35, 98-108.

Fletcher, R., Büscher, B., 2017. The PES Conceit: Revisiting the Relationship between Payments for Environmental Services and Neoliberal Conservation. Ecological Economics 132, 224-231.

Gibson-Graham, J. K. 2002. Beyond Global Vs. Local: Economic Politics Outside the Binary Frame. In: Herod, A. & Wright, M. (eds.) Geographies of Power: Placing Scale. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers.

Hart, G. 2006. Denaturalizing Dispossession: Critical Ethnography in the Age of Resurgent Imperialism. Antipode, 38, 977-1004.

Kolinjivadi, V., Van Hecken, G., Vela Almeida, D., Kosoy, N., Dupras, J., 2017. Neoliberal performatives and the “making” of payments for ecosystem services (PES). Forthcoming in Progress in Human Geography. DOI: 10.1177/0309132517735707.

Leggett, M. & Lovell, H. 2012. Community perceptions of REDD+: a case study from Papua New Guinea. Climate Policy, 12, 115-134.

McAfee, K. & Shapiro, E. N. 2010. Payments for Ecosystem Services in Mexico: Nature, Neoliberalism, Social Movements, and the State. Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 100, 579-599.

McElwee, P., Nghiem, T., Le, H., Vu, H., Tran, N., 2014. Payments for environmental services and contested neoliberalisation in developing countries: A case study from Vietnam. Journal of Rural Studies 36, 423-440.

Milne, S. & Adams, B. 2012. Market Masquerades: Uncovering the Politics of Community-level Payments for Environmental Services in Cambodia. Development and Change, 43, 133-158.

Pasgaard, M. (2015). Lost in translation? How project actors shape REDD+ policy and outcomes in Cambodia. Asia Pacific Viewpoint, 56(1), 111-127.

Pirard, R., 2012. Market-based instruments for biodiversity and ecosystem services: A lexicon. Environmental Science and Policy 19-20, 59-68.

Shapiro-Garza, E., 2013a. Contesting the market-based nature of Mexico’s national payments for ecosystem services programs: Four sites of articulation and hybridization. Geoforum 46, 5-15.

Shapiro-Garza, E., 2013b. Contesting market-based conservation: Payments for ecosystem services as a surface of engagement for rural social movements in Mexico. Human Geography 6(1), 134-150.

St Martin, K. 2006. The impact of “community” on fisheries management in the US Northeast. Geoforum, 37, 169-184.

Sullivan, S., 2006. Elephant in the room? Problematising ‘new’ (neoliberal) biodiversity conservation. Forum for Development Studies 33(1), 105-135.

Van Hecken, G. & Bastiaensen, J. 2010. Payments for Ecosystem Services in Nicaragua: Do Market-based Approaches Work? Development and Change, 41, 421-444.

Van Hecken, G., Bastiaensen, J., Huybrechs, F., 2015a. What’s in a name? Epistemic perspectives and Payments for Ecosystem Services policies in Nicaragua. Geoforum 63, 55-66.

Van Hecken, G., Bastiaensen, J. & Windey, C. 2015b. Towards a power-sensitive and socially-informed analysis of payments for ecosystem services (PES): Addressing the gaps in the current debate. Ecological Economics, 120, 117-125.

Van Hecken, G., Kolinjivadi, V., Windey, C., McElwee, P., Shapiro-Garza, E., Huybrechs, F., & Bastiaensen, J., 2017. Silencing Agency in Payments for Ecosystem Services (PES) by Essentializing a Neoliberal ‘Monster’ Into Being: A Response to Fletcher & Büscher’s ‘PES Conceit’. Forthcoming in Ecological Economics. doi:https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ecolecon.2017.10.023.

Tourism is undergoing major changes in the advent of social media networks and other forms of digital technology. This has affected a number of tourism related processes including marketing, destination making, travel experiences and visitor feedback but also various tourism subsectors, namely hospitality, transportation and tour operators. An already substantial and growing body of research has investigated these developments, both regarding tourism processes (Munar 2011, Tham et. al. 2013, Mkono & Tribe, 2017) and industry subsectors (Leung et al. 2013, Munar & Jacobsen, 2014, Gretzel & Fesenmaier 2009, Hvass & Munar, 2012). However, largely overlooked are the effects of these changes on the urban fabric and its social structure, in particular questions concerning inequality.

Digital technologies are widely perceived as a vehicle to foster economic upliftment. Advocacy for new digital platforms and devices often includes claims that they allow for a wider distribution of the benefits of tourism (Martin 2016, Cheng 2016). There is plenty of evidence that tourism, helped by digital technologies, has dispersed into urban spaces/places which have not previously been associated much with the tourist gaze (Maitland & Newman 2009). In this situation, even social inequality, and poverty as such, can become a tourist attraction and at times subject to commodification processes, as research on slum tourism has shown (Burgold et al. 2013, Freire-Medeiros 2013, Frenzel et al. 2015, Frenzel 2016, Whyte 2017).

But claims that digitally enhanced tourism is able to address issues of inequality remain contested as resistance and protest against noise, overcrowding and tourism–related gentrification has become an issue across various cities (Colomb/Novy 2017). They also remain largely untested empirically.

Against this backdrop we aim to bring together two aspects of tourism studies which have been treated rather isolated from one another but need to be addressed in their complex interrelations: the influence of digital technologies on tourism and the question of tourism and urban inequality. The panel seeks to examine a broad range of studies that deal with issues of urban inequality in regard to the application of digital technologies in the tourism sector. The research questions guiding papers for this session emerge from three interconnected dimensions (1) Narratives and representations; (2) Media infrastructures and the power of algorithms; and (3) Political economy and material effects.

Narratives and Representation
Some insinuations have been made in terms of the potential of social media to reduce inequality, due to its accessibility and the free or low-cost nature of its use. Social media may enable marginalised urban citizens to amplify their voice in urban conflicts. (Martin 2016, Xenos, Vromen & Loader 2014). Tourists can be catalyst in these processes by providing an audience and prompting the need and the economic incentive to create local stories about places. More generally speaking, tourism has been shown to put places otherwise marginalized on maps from which they were previously hidden (Steinbrink et al 2014), however such processes may have problematic consequences (Holst 2016). We seek to understand better how digital technologies can assist in putting certain, either unknown or stigmatized, areas “on the map” and thus increase their visibility as a destination in terms of tourism offerings (Cheng 2016)

Media infrastructures and the power of algorithms
While there is evidence for a wider expansion of digital infrastructures into neglected neighborhoods, the quality, speed and spread of media infrastructures often remains reflective of the relative wealth of an area. How do digital infrastructure projects affect tourism‘s ability to alleviate poverty? And even if infrastructural limits are overcome, researchers are increasingly skeptical about claims regarding the platform economy’s promise of equality (Baka 2015). Algorythmic management and rationality is far from neutral (Jeacle and Carter 2011). Do the algorythmic rationales and software principles of digitally enhanced tourism work as empowering the urban poor? And are platforms really “equal” when tour operators with larger capital seem to have advantages in terms of social media management and also the manipulation of algorithms?

Political Economy and material effects
Key sharing economy actors of urban tourism like AirBnB claim that their endeavor has poverty alleviating aspects. Thus struggling families may increase their revenue by temporarily renting out vacant rooms or housing. The evidence for this is scarce and often contradicting claims are made, e.g. that Airbnb drives up local rents and has displacement effects (Lee 2016, Sans & Domínguez. 2016). In addition, some research has demonstrated that the sharing economy is displacing traditional tourism economies with significant consequences for local operators that rely on this market (Fang, Ye & Law, 2015). Moreover leakages need to be re-considered as every AirBnB transaction moves locally generated money to California.

Methodological considerations
We invite papers from a variety of disciplines and with both qualitative and quantitative approaches. We also note that digital technologies have opened new methodological possibilities, in particular for social science and big data uses. We encourage contributions that make use of these new technologies, as well as reflect on the methodological implications of the new availability (or limits there of) of large scale data sets in digital form.