RGS-IBG Annual Conference, Royal Geographical Society, London
Wednesday 30 August – Friday 1 September 2017
Call for Papers (Deadline Monday 6th February, 2017)
Abstract
Research foregrounding the body has challenged geographical scholarship. A focus on the body has opened up alternative geopolitical sites, illustrated diverse locations of work, and served as focus for everyday consumption practices (e.g. clothing and food). In such scholarship the body poses questions of where the limits of ‘political’ and/or ‘economic’ activity are drawn; which movements across and within these boundaries count, and how such borders and their transgressions are rendered visible. These strands of geographical thought on the body are influenced by (and influence) cultural geographies stressing the relational emergence of embodiment. Rather than asking how the body changes geographical understandings of geopolitical and economic space, the question here is how does the body ‘itself’ alter in relation to various spaces/senses.
This session examines how bodies question geographies and how geographies challenge bodies by focusing on technology. We build on research that considers how (digital) technologies can be understood as (‘subject’-producing) ‘objects’ of study, but also accounts of technology as, or in interaction with, ‘backgrounds’ of everyday life. The session asks how geographies of the body and geographies of technology might intersect, and more broadly, the purchase of geographical thought for understanding contemporary social life with technologies.
Organisers
Cordelia Freeman – University of Nottingham
Lizzie Richardson – Durham University
Please send abstracts of no more than 250 words to Cordelia (Cordelia.Freeman@nottingham.ac.uk) and Lizzie (elizabeth.c.richardson@durham.ac.uk) by Monday 6th February.