Spaces of Emergent Authority: Embodiment, Materiality, and the Making of Common Life

Call for Papers: Association of American Geographers annual conference 2015, Chicago, IL.

Spaces of Emergent Authority: Embodiment, Materiality and the Making of Common Life

Deadline Friday 31st October, 2014.  

Organized by Julian Brigstocke (Cardiff University, UK) and Leila Dawney (Brighton University, UK)

What is the relation between processes of (historical, political, technological, environmental) emergence and the material, affective and spiritual investments that attach bodies to power? (How) is authority generated when the world is experienced as perpetual process and creative force? (Why) are we bound to a fate in which spectacular violence subsumes the space of collaborative political participation, affective attachment and justice? (Where) are there vital new practices of collective life that resist such violence or generate authority as a collaborative, egalitarian art? (How) are emerging commons and practices of commoning generating creative new entanglements with material agency and more-than-human life? Conversely, (how) are emergent forms of authority contributing to new forms of domination and inequality?  

In contrast to accounts of modern authority that place it in decline or crisis, this session aims to explore the contemporary production of proliferating emergent forms of authority, and the practices, technologies and performances through which emergent authorities surge into being. In doing so, the session aims to contribute to a more nuanced understanding of authority – a modality of power that relies on trust and affective investment – as productive of forms of life. In part, this involves an attempt to challenge discourses that identify authority solely with domination, and also to think of authority in terms of how it can be mobilized for politics and practices of empowerment, equality, and commoning. The session invites papers that explore the materialities and practices of emergent authority and power (whether hierarchical or egalitarian) in the present, including practices and imaginaries of making and performing new forms of common life. Topics may include, but are not limited to:

·         Spatialities of emergent forms of authority and power
·         New spaces of authority, trust and expertise
·         The role of material and more-than-human agency in emergent social and political forms
·         Authority, commoning, or practices of resistance
·         What is at stake in understanding power through processual ontology
·         The aesthetics and collaborative art of experimental authority relations
·         Experiential and biopolitical authority
·         Creative and performative approaches to power and authority
·         Materialisms (old and new) and power
·         The authority of affect
·         Crises of authority

Format: Paper session (15 minutes presentation plus 5 minutes discussion per paper).

Please send abstracts (max 250 words) including the title of the proposed paper presentation, name of author(s), and contact information to Julian Brigstocke ([email protected]) and Leila Dawney ([email protected]) by Friday, October 31st , 2014.  

For general information on the conference see: www.aag.org/cs/annualmeeting/call_for_papers