A 2-day workshop organised by the Politics-State-Space and Lived and Material Cultures Research Clusters

This workshop seeks to open up a conversation concerning the interplay between subjectivity, spatiality and materiality as constitutive features of the geopolitical. In response to recent calls for a critical geopolitics that challenges the centrality of Western elite practices and representations, the workshop aims to conceptualize how political subjectivity and materiality intersect in and through geopolitical space and asks what this might mean for the way in which the geopolitical is performed.

The workshop draws inspiration from a range of contemporary geographical approaches: recent feminist scholarship on the embodiment of political subjects, research on transnational citizenship and subaltern geopolitics on the value of theorising the geopolitical from the margins; and recent work on the geographies of materiality and affect and the roles they play in shaping contemporary geopolitical orderings. By considering these approaches together, the workshop aims to work toward a reconceptualisation of the everyday enactments of the geopolitical. The workshop is furthermore concerned with questions of methodology, namely with the methods available for tracing the material through the geopolitical.

We are now inviting submissions of abstracts for papers in a variety of formats, including 10-minute position papers and 20-minute research papers on these themes. Participants might, for instance, explore how recent critiques of scale inform critical geopolitical thought (Marston 2000, 2004, Marston et al 2005, Jones et al 2007, Law 2004, Gibson-Graham 2002), or the material assemblage of contemporary geopolitical orders (Ong and Collier 2005, Bennett 2010).

We are particularly keen to encourage submissions by postgraduate researchers and have a small number of postgraduate bursaries available to assist with travel expenses. Please let us know, if you are interested in applying for one of these.

Confirmed Participants: Professor Audrey Kobayashi (Queen's University, Canada) Dr. Merje Kuus (University of British Columbia, Canada) Professor Lynn Staeheli (Durham University, United Kingdom) Professor Joe Painter (Durham University, United Kingdom) Dr. Martin Müller (University of St. Gallen, Switzerland)

Participants not intending to give papers are also welcome to register.

Deadline: 15 April 2011

Please submit your abstract to: Kathrin Hörschelmann (kathrin.horschelmann@durham.ac.uk); Matthew Kearns (m.b.kearnes@durham.ac.uk), or Andrew Baldwin (w.a.baldwin@durham.ac.uk)