Call for Papers: AAG, New Orleans, 10-14 April 2018
*Urban Political Ecology: Bodies, Social Reproduction and Everyday Life*
Session organisers: Archie Davies (King’s College London) and James Angel (King’s College London)
Please email abstracts (no more than 250 words) to james.angel@kcl.ac.uk by Wednesday 18th October
Urban political ecology provides a valuable lens through which to interrogate the power-laden production of urban environments, undoing reactionary binaries between the city and nature and offering possibilities for imagining and enacting more democratic socionatural trajectories (Swyngedouw 1996, Heynen, Kaika and Swyngedouw 2006, Heynen 2014). Yet recent years have seen calls for an urban political ecology more closely attuned to the sensibilities, senses and rhythms of everyday life (Loftus 2012). Urban environments are produced through the dialectical relation between waged and unwaged labour, yet thus far urban political ecological engagements with the “fleshy, messy” (Katz 2001) work of social reproduction has been relatively sparse. For Doshi (2017) there is a need for a more “embodied” urban political ecology, beginning from the body as the site at which contested socioecological processes are made and remade.
This session seeks to deepen the dialogue between urban political ecology and theories of the body and everyday life. We welcome contributions that forge conversations between urban political ecology and a range of approaches to the everyday and the embodied.
Approaches could include, but are not limited to:
– materialist feminism,
– postcolonial and decolonial perspectives,
– new materialisms,
– geographies of affect and emotion, and
– queer theory.
We are interested in both empirical and theoretical contributions dealing with subjects such as urban food and hunger, energy, pollution, waste, infrastructure, water and more. We are keen to include papers that illuminate the role of the embodied and the everyday in mediating and constituting unjust urban environments, and the political possibilities opened up by seeing daily reproductive practices as a locus of struggle that might prefigure alternative urban natures.
References
Doshi, S. (2017) Embodied urban political ecology: five propositions. Area 49(1): 125–128
Heynen, N. (2014) Urban political ecology I: The urban century. Progress in Human Geography 38(4) 598–604
Heynen N, Kaika M, and Swyngedouw E (eds) (2006) In the Nature of Cities: Urban Political Ecology and the Politics of Urban Metabolism. Abingdon: Routledge
Katz, C. (2001) Vagabond Capitalism and the Necessity of Social Reproduction. Antipode 33(4): 709–728
Loftus A (2012) Everyday Environmentalism: Creating an Urban Political Ecology. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press