RGS Conference 2015   

A number of ARN members participated in this year’s Annual Conference of the Royal Geographical Society / Institute of British Geographers:

Julian Brigstocke presented a paper on ‘Enfolded Futures’ in a session on Suspending the Anthropocene: Impasse, Lost Futures, Déjà vu. He also presented a paper on’Biopolitical Authority, Laughter, and Violence in fin-de-siècle French Anarchism’ in a session on Historical Geographies of Anarchism: situating struggles, studying environments. 

Leila Dawney presented a paper on ‘Soldiers’ bodies, authority and the militarisation of everyday life’, in a session on Domesticating Geopolitics.

Sam Kirwan organised a session on Geographies of Debt and Indebtedness: Everyday and Comparitive Frames. The papers in this session brought together varied perspectives on debt burdens across a range of national jurisdictions and emotional registers, and provided a new agenda for investigating debt can be as a spatial (as well as a temporal and legal) relation.

Naomi Millner presented a paper on ‘Hybrid Traditions: Nature and the politics of knowledge amongst indigenous and agreocological communities in Central America', in a session on Knowing (and Engaging) Nature Otherwise.

By Naomi Millner

The following blog post was initially posted to the Bristol 24-7 news site.

In the past couple of weeks, an issue that has long been an issue has hit a ‘tipping point’ in terms of public awareness. It’s strange when this happens. Suddenly the language of ‘crisis’ proliferates. Suddenly everyone wants to know what they can do to help. Historically, it’s often been images of suffering children that either provoke such tipping points, or channel them to a wider audience. Perhaps it is the powerlessness of a baby in the face of indifferent natural or political forces that brings this rise out of us. Or perhaps it makes a far-off struggle suddenly feel very near.

By Patrick Bresnihan and Naomi Millner

Please find below the Call for Papers for a panel at the international conference, UNDISCIPLINED ENVIRONMENTS , Stockholm, March 20-23, 2016.

The More-than-Human Commons and the Politics of Knowledge

The papers in this session take as their starting point a post-colonial politics of knowledge that embraces material and nonhuman forces as critical allies in the struggle to determine more expansive ways of organizing in common. The concept of the more-than-human commons attempts to articulate a relationship between limits and possibility, relationality and agency, human and non-human that moves beyond humanist, or dualist, ways of thinking and doing politics. The more-than-human commons consequently provides a counterpoint not only to what anthropologist Arturo Escobar calls the “analytic of finitude,” a “cultural order in which we are forever condemned to labor under the iron law of scarcity,” but also to techno-utopian fantasies of infinite growth that tend to ignore material questions of reproduction (1999, 6). Disrupting the binaries of social and natural, human and non-human, that undergird the history of capitalist enclosure and biopolitical control, the more-than-human commons foregrounds conflicts over what ecologies are visible and how they count within new regulatory and economic regimes (de la Cadeña 2010). We invite empirical and theoretical contributions that: