Call for papers
2021 RGS-IBG Annual Conference, London, Tuesday 31 August – Friday 3 September.
The theme of the conference is borders, borderlands, and bordering.
Elemental borderscapes: materialities, politics, and encounters
Conveners: James Riding (Newcastle University) & Carl Dahlman (Miami University, Ohio)
Format: Paper Session (in-person if possible)
Sponsorship: (Applying to) the Social and Cultural Geography Research Group (SCGRG) & the Political Geography Research Group (PolGRG)
Deadline for submissions: Friday, February 26, 2021
The ‘surface area’ of France, is 528,576 square kilometres. For roughly 2,640 kilometres, this territory is bordered by a maritime space constituting ‘territorial waters’, the entire surface area of the national territory is surrounded by an ‘air space’, the defence, integrity and security of these three spaces, terrestrial, maritime and aerial, are the object of constant concern on the part of the authorities (Perec, 2008: 73-75).
Geographers and others have begun to tease out the ontological, epistemological, and ethico-political implications of thinking about and with the elemental (Engelmann and McCormack, 2018; Squire, 2016). Encounters between traditional elements like water, earth, and air in borderscapes enable us to complicate conceptualisations of the border and borderlands (Riding and Dahlman, 2021; Wilson, 2017). When we think of elemental borders, tracing mountain ranges or a river valley, skirting the shores of seas and the depths of lakes might be initial areas to be explored as they are subject to atmospheric conditions; they erode, are windswept and baked by the sun, they ebb and flow with the tide, shift and meander over time, freeze and thaw with the seasons, rise and fall after drought and precipitation, and as such are in flux and are difficult to pin down and fix as boundaries. On the one hand, they often serve as boundaries for political projects that imagine communities separated by ‘natural’ divisions. On the other hand, they are fluid geographies, forever eroding, floating, or flowing signalling a world of mobilities and instabilities (Steinberg and Peters, 2015). Yet all borders are elemental human-nonhuman spaces and engaging with the elements enables a renewed geographical discussion of the ambiguous horizontal boundaries of states and the indefinite vertical boundaries of water, land, and sky (Squire, 2016). This paper session comprises a vision for what elemental borderscapes are while at the same time producing elemental more-than-human stories about encounters with everyday borderscapes where borders operate as a zone of exception and as a social practice and discourse (Paasi, 1999).
We invite papers on the materialities and politics of elemental borderscapes and encounters with them. We welcome diverse approaches to and conceptualisations of an elemental borderscape and we particularly welcome papers from regions beyond north America and Europe. We also invite papers from both political and cultural geography and creative interventions at borders as well as theoretical, descriptive, and ethnographic accounts of borderscapes. Possible themes for papers might include but are not limited to:
- The contested nature of elemental borderscapes in relation to migration, asylum, and refugee geographies, and the difficult journeys made to traverse rivers, seas, and mountains
- The materiality of an ever shifting elemental border and conversely the fixity of the representation of that border
- Geopolitical (mis)readings and storytelling of border materiality
- Ethnographic stories of borders and their cultural histories and geographies
- Historically contested borders and their relationship with local conflicts
- The theorisation of water borders using wet ontologies and the more-than-wet
- The theorisation of elemental borders as more-than-human
- Bodies of water: bodily encounters with water borders
- Creative engagements with borders: representing the border
Please email an abstract of up to 250 words (plus your name and affiliation) to james.riding@ncl.ac.uk and dahlmac@miamioh.edu by Friday, February 26, 2021. (A decision will be made on in-person elements of the RGS-IBG 2021 annual conference in early April).
Further information about the RGS-IBG 2021 conference can be found here: Royal Geographical Society – Annual International Conference (rgs.org)
References
Engelmann, S. and McCormack, D. 2018. Elemental aesthetics: On artistic experiments with solar energy. Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 108(1), 241-259.
Paasi, A. 1999. Boundaries as social practice and discourse: The Finnish-Russian border. Regional Studies 33(7): 669–680.
Perec, G. 2008. Species of spaces and other pieces. London: Penguin.
Riding, J. and Dahlman, C. 2021. Montage space: Borderlands, micronations, terra nullius, and the imperialism of the geographical imagination. Dialogues in Human Geography e-pub ahead of print.
Squire, R. 2016. Rock, water, air and fire: Foregrounding the elements in the Gibraltar-Spain dispute. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 34(3): 545–563.
Steinberg, P.E and Peters, K. 2015. Wet ontologies, fluid spaces: Giving depth to volume through oceanic thinking. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 33(2): 247–264.
Wilson, H.F. 2017. On geography and encounter: Bodies, borders, and difference. Progress in Human Geography, 41(4), 451-471.