Conference Theme: "Imperialism and resultant disorder: imperatives for social justice"
http://www.5thiccg.org/ The purpose of the conference is to provide an informal forum for politically critical discussion and debate. We welcome all that are engaged in promoting a critical politics, especially those related to the main conference themes. The format of the conference will be varied and much more akin to workshops, rather than the sort of activities typical of academic meetings. The objective, besides promoting the further development and diffusion of critical geographies, is to avoid a vertical transmission of knowledge and to ensure a more democratic debate and effective progress of ideas. The inaugural keynote address will be delivered by Utsa Patnaik, Centre for Economic Studies and Planning, Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi on 3rd December 2007 at 6.00 p.m. on Imperialism and Contemporary Disorder in World Resources and Food Security at TISS, Mumbai Campus. Some thematic sessions are already in the process of being organised. More information will be made available through the conference web site ( http://www.5thiccg.org/ ) Please contact the organiser directly if you would like to be included. Session Themes Valorising regions: modernisation and land usurpation The session will focus on Special economic zones that have become a significant option of the neo-liberal state in South Asia after China. Contact : Swapna Banerjee-Guha, [EMAIL PROTECTED] <mailto:sbanerjeeguha%40hotmail.com> Environmental justice and imperialism Major issues covered will include social justice in regions exploited for mineral and other resource, the impact of warfare, policing, and militarism on people's health (including the imprisonment of people), the contribution of resource extraction regimes in different parts of the world to the uneven making of national states and capitalism. Historical examples are strongly encouraged that analyse strategies leading to prevention or successes against environmental injustices. Contact : Salvatore Engel-Di Mauro, [EMAIL PROTECTED] <mailto:engeldis%40newpaltz.edu> Land and other resource struggles in globalising cities and countrysides The land question; Global take-over of water supplies by the few; Struggles for control of the oceans and the question of over-fishing. Contact : Blanca Ramirez, [EMAIL PROTECTED] <mailto:blare19%40prodigy.net.mx> Labour migration Details will be forthcoming on the conference website. Contact : Geraldine Pratt, [EMAIL PROTECTED] <mailto:gpratt%40geog.ubc.ca> International pathways of critical geography In this workshop, we would like to continue the process of assessing the situations of critical geographies in different national and linguistic contexts and their international connection. Critical geography group Berlin contact:[EMAIL PROTECTED] <mailto:ulrich.best%40phil.tu-chemnitz> .de Social Movements, Resource Control and the Politics of Social Justice Neoliberalism entails "accumulation by dispossession" - the usurpation of means of production, subsistence and reproduction that are not mediated by the market and their insertion into the orbits of the expanded reproduction of capital. Across the global North and South social movements vigorously oppose these modern-day enclosures of the commons and in the process develop forms of resource control and new conceptions of social justice. This session invites empirically grounded explorations of popular challenges to accumulation by dispossession, the ways in which subaltern communities reclaim and reinvent resource control, and how movements of the dispossessed link their contention over resource control to the politics of social justice across the global South and North. Contact: Alf Gunvald Nilsen, [EMAIL PROTECTED] <mailto:alf.nilsen%40nottingham.ac.uk> Transnational Organising New forms of political solidarity and consciousness have begun to emerge in the 21 st century, as social movements, trade unions, NGOs and other organisations increase their spatial reach: constructing networks of support and solidarity for their particular struggles and participating with other movements in a range of actions to resist neoliberal globalisation. Transnational solidarities between such political actors seem to operate through overlapping, interacting, competing, and differentially placed and resourced networks. This workshop strives to bring together activist-academics and activists from a range of Indian social movements (involved in struggles for land, water and forest resources; against GM agriculture; and against neoliberal globalization) to discuss the day-to-day processes that underpin potential transnational collaborative practices and the potentials, problems and practices of transnational organizing. The workshop will be an opportunity for: (i) a direct exchange of experiences between the participants; (ii) activist-academics to learn from social movement activist experiences; (iii) a practical discussion about how to effect sustainable transnational organising and how to nurture collaborative practices between activists and activist-academics. Contact: Paul Routledge [EMAIL PROTECTED] <mailto:Paul.Routledge%40ges.gla.ac.uk> Liquid city: urban infrastructure in question The complex interactions between disease, water and urban infrastructure reveal that whilst the rationalized metropolis or "bacteriological city" may represent an abstract ideal for the organizational structure of the modern city it has never fully corresponded with urban realities because of the political and economic tensions that underlie the process of capitalist urbanization. These anomalies that pervade the technological structure of the modern city become most strikingly represented in the marginal spaces of the city and in those cities that are themselves marginal within the global economy. By exploring the history of water infrastructure beyond the metropolitan core of Europe and North America we can uncover fresh insights into the limitations of the bacteriological city as a universal model and also disentangle some of the political tensions underlying the introduction of technological networks in the capitalist city. The modernization of urban infrastructure required an institutional context that could facilitate the flow of capital into the built environment yet this historic dynamic has been neglected in many studies of urban governance in the global South. Contact: Matthew Gandy, [EMAIL PROTECTED] <mailto:m.gandy%40ucl.ac.uk> 'Political Economy of Restructuring and Gentrification in South and South-east Asian cities' 'Opening up of vast land areas and development of mega projects through corporate / private initiatives in several large cities in South and South-east Asia in recent times is symbolic to the process of global urban restructuring. Essentially aiming at accommodating increasing international activities and associated infrastructure, the restructuring has promoted these cities as real estate settings in favour of large developers and elite groups, aggravated class fractions and marginalised the poor by legitimising repressive planning and zoning regulations. The recent JNURM ( Jawaharlal Nehru Urban Renewal Mission) is an example in India. The session aims to bring together concerned academicians and activists to discuss the politics of the above process and the resistance efforts experienced in such cities in South and South-east Asia.' Contact address: [EMAIL PROTECTED] <mailto:sbanerjeeguha%40hotmail.com> Contemporary debates in economic geography: Politics of Scale, 15 years later Analysing regional and local economies and looking for the causal relations determining its performance implicate addressing questions of uneven power relations. Identifying actors and its interests and the geographical scale at which they operate are the critical issues in here. Region: Is the regionalisation of national economies a desirable trend? The role of regional development agencies in the EU and the US: decentralising or centralising power? National states: The role of national states. Hollowing out of the state? State power in the north and in the south. Europe turning right; Latin America turning left: geoeconomic (trade, TNCs location) and geopolitical implications. Supranational integration: in whose interest? The EU and the regional economies. Free Trade Agreements: how are these negotiated and which are their consequences over regional economies? NAFTA, Mercosur, ASEAN. The future of the EU and other trading blocks. International scale: TNCs, central capitalistic states and international institutions: globalisation or imperialism? TNCï¿1/2 s geoeconomic strategies and itï¿1/2 s participation in public policing. The future of the World Bank, the IMF and the WTO: what is in the agenda of central capitalistic states? Participation of peripheral economies in international negotiations: a more democratic or authoritarian order for the future? Inter-Capitalistic competition and central capitalistic states as major actors in the world economy. The purpose of this session is to bring together academics from the north and the south interested in the construction of scale debate, in seeking to address the politics of scale from diverse experiences. Contact address: Jeronimo Montero, [EMAIL PROTECTED] <mailto:jeronimo.montero%40durham.ac.uk> ACME Debate: Critical Geographies in Undergraduate Teaching A panel discussion revolving around the role and potential for teaching critical geographies in undergraduate education. Discussion questions include: What are the barriers to assuming critical viewpoints in teaching, where are the opportunities? Do we have a sufficient infrastructure to teach critical geographies in undergraduate program? Panel participants include leaders in critical scholarship, research and/or activism in geography. The context for the panel will be set by the planned release of a new textbook (tentatively) titled "Reader in Critical Geographies" Praxis(e)Press. Organizers: Harald Bauder, Salvatore Engel-DiMauro Subaltern Cosmopolitanism Cosmopolitanism, situations in which people of different cultures meet and exchange ideas, has traditionally been associated with elite groups and with euro-centric political geographies. Recent oppositional political movements, especially those associated with resistances to neo-liberal globalisation, have shown, however, that cosmopolitan forms of political identities also shape culturally and politically subversive alliances and flows of information. This has energised a set of theoretical and political concerns with the formation of subaltern or insurgent cosmopolitanisms such as the forms of association developed at the World Social Forum. In this session we seek to engage with the significance of subaltern cosmopolitanism for international solidarities and for their impact on elite politics and on more mainstream political movements; the connections and networks through which subaltern cosmopolitan identities are produced and generated; and the importance of these approaches for existing explanations of place-based politics. In addition to rethinking the historical and contemporary impact of politicised forms of subaltern cosmopolitanism, we seek to evaluate the significance of these forms of political identity and practice for contemporary forms of opposition to neo-liberal globalisation. Organisers: Dave Featherstone, Department of Geography, University of Liverpool Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] <mailto:djfeath%40liverpool.ac.uk> Aaron Pollack, División de Desarrollo Sustentable, Universidad Intercultural del Estado de México Email:[EMAIL PROTECTED] <mailto:aapollack%40gmail.com> Challenging the hegemonies in education: Creating spaces for multiple modes of expression within science and technology education Education, a potentially rich experience in meaning making and expression within communities, has increasingly become restrictive, reduced, diluted, rigid, commoditized, centralized and autocratically controlled. Humans have a variety of modes of expression of thoughts and feelings; and diverse communication practices, artistic and aesthetic visions, musical emotions, technical and architectural designs. This diversity in productions is multiplied by the differences of gender, cultures, languages, technologies, arts, music, etc. T here is an additional issue of cognitive pluralism in the field of education. Cognitive content as well as cognitive processes depend on artefacts and tools of the culture including language and technology. Technological design, tool making and tool use are all best understood as a dynamic interplay between individuals, their society and their environment, at various levels of interaction within different space and time situations. In a sense technology can be seen as a metaphor for human evolution through processes that links our environment and body, our doing and being. The proposed session argues for a pluralistic approach to science and technology education and makes a case for a less mechanistic and more humanistic science education. It advocates a perception of technology that values cooperative and collaborative work, multiple expressions and multiplicity of creative and locally valued productions, that is less a handmaiden of science or its inevitable applications. The session will also address the difficulties of implementing educational practices aiming at the formation and support of multi-expressive subjects - students and teachers - in the face of challenges of the hegemonic global networks. Contact address: Chitra Natarajan, [EMAIL PROTECTED] <mailto:chitran%40hbcse.tifr.res.in> Marginalized on the street: experiences, performances and strategies of street workers in the global north and south As gaps between the rich and poor grow, the number of those who find themselves working on the streets continues to rise. This workshop will explore issues surrounding those who work in the urban informal sector (i.e., street vendors, beggars, waste pickers, street performers, sex workers, street children), drawing from examples in both the Global North and South. It will be an opportunity to unravel myths, share experiences and uncover strategies pertinent to the lives and struggles of informal sector street workers. Among others, themes could include: ethnographic enquiries into everyday life; the role of the state at various scales; resistance, activist, and entrepreneurial strategies; and gendered, racialized asnd sexualized politics of the streets. Contact: Kate Swanson, [EMAIL PROTECTED] <mailto:kate.swanson%40ges.gla.ac.uk> or Lorena Muñoz, [EMAIL PROTECTED] <mailto:lmunoz%40usc.edu> Transformative politics for migrant workers? The aim of this panel is to bring together migrant workers and movements with practitioners, campaigners, labour organisers, policy influencers and academics to discuss and reflect on the experiences of those who migrate for work; both within and between southern and northern countries. Migrant labour is predominantly focused in the least prestigious, remunerated, protected, enriching and secure parts of the labour-scape. Migrant work tends to be low-paid, sub-contracted, flexible, casual, seasonal/temporary and informal sector based. Such workers often experience gross exploitation and what have been called forms of modern slavery. While such treatment is not new for working classes, many argue that the vulnerability modern migrant labourers are feeling in the 21 st century is qualitatively different because it involves a combination of intensifying trajectories of neoliberalism, globalisation, neo-colonialism, patriarchy, racism and racialised border controls. This panel will consider the labouring experiences of migrant workers, and also crucially discuss strategies and agencies of migrants' resistance to hegemonic power in order to increase the power they have over their own lives. As such we hope to immerse ourselves in a discussion of transformative and emancipatory politics for social justice amongst migrant workers. Contact: Louise Waite, [EMAIL PROTECTED] <mailto:l.waite%40leeds.ac.uk> -- Anivar Aravind moving Republic Peringavu.P.O Thrissur-18 Kerala http://anivar.movingrepublic.org/about --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ greenyouth mailinglist is the activist support mailinglist for kerala To post to this group, send email to [email protected] -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
