Politics of State-Change: Matter and Transition
Call for papers: AAG New Orleans, April 10-14, 2018
Organizers: Dr Ingrid A. Medby (Oxford Brookes University) and Prof. Jason Dittmer (UCL)
Central to the politics of recent months have been concerns with the materialization of particular versions of the past in the present, with Confederate monuments serving as a flashpoint for protest, counter-protest, and bloodshed. The removal of the statues in question (and the white supremacy they materialize) is seen by both sides as a potential existential threshold that will tip the polity into a new state of being.
At the same time, debate continues to rage about climate change and our political responsibilities in the Anthropocene, not least as the US plans to withdraw from global mitigation efforts. Here, the concern is with matter in transition; it is disappearing, appearing, or reappearing precisely due to our lack of action.
Uniting these examples is the politics of presence and absence, of the material and immaterial; and at its core, the politics of matter and its transformation. Political geographers have produced rich bodies of work on both memorializations and materialities, on symbolism, affect, and the more-than-human. What we seek to interrogate in this session, however, is neither the physical absence nor presence per se, neither the solid nor the fluid. Instead, we wish to consider the state-change itself: the political effects of the processual transformation, whatever the cause or matter. From absent to present, or vice versa; from immaterial to material; from land to water to gas, solid, liquid, and air. What do these changes themselves ‘do’ to politics? How can we think of matter in its multiplicity? What are the consequences of something lost, forgotten, backgrounded, or absent reappearing – or vice versa? How are, should and can such change be responded to politically, and/or academically by political geographers? What does it do to our academic work to truly take into account the event of change itself?
We invite papers that consider these broad conceptual issues, with the aim of fostering interesting discussions. Researchers are encouraged to submit abstracts that relate to topics broadly engaging with the above.
Please email your abstract of no more than 250 words (and/or any questions) to Ingrid A. Medby (imedby@brookes.ac.uk) by Monday October 9, 2017. Please include institutional affiliation, contact details, etc.
Successful participants will be notified by October 16, and will have to pay the registration fee and submit their abstracts online at the AAG website before October 25, 2017.