Critical Inquiries into the Production of Place

Sessions - Calls for Participants

Mya J. Wheeler, University of Manitoba

Amelia Curran, Carleton University

CAG Winnipeg 2019

*Sponsored by the Environment and Resources Study Group*

TITLE: Critical Inquiries into the Production of Place

Tuck and McKenzie recently identified the need to take place more seriously in social science inquiry, arguing that a focus on place in critical research “matters because it enables greater attention to the ways in which land and environmental issues intersect with social issues and social life” (2015: 5). In this session we are interested in how place has been taken up empirically through geographical research, particularly in ways that disclose “the naturalization of bodies and places” and/or “alternative spatial practices [that highlight] more humanly workable geographies” (McKittrick 2006: xv). How places come to matter are vital in the struggles to decolonize how place is utilized and researched. We seek examples of research that investigates the production of place in order to critique it, and/or, research that focuses on practices that produce alternative places.

We welcome papers using critical spatial theories and methodologies such as but not limited to material semiotic, new materialism, post-humanist, non-representational, feminist, post-colonial, indigenous, or disability theories, and wide-ranging empirical topics that understand both place and bodies in open and unconventional ways.  Although we specify a focus on place, we hope to attract not only work that uses this term, “but a range of work that uses different terms to talk about the materiality of the world, including its physical characteristics and related historical, social, and cultural dimensions, as well as its both localized and interconnected aspects” (Tuck and McKenzie 2015: 75). For example, we would like to engage approaches that go beyond understanding place as a site of social relations and more towards recognition of ongoing material practices that situate places but do not locate them statically.

If you wish to participate in this session, please contact Mya Wheeler (umwheelm@myumanitoba.ca) and Amelia Curran (AmeliaCurran@cmail.carleton.ca) with an abstract of 250 words by March 4, 2019.

Tuck, E., & McKenzie, M. (2015). Place in Research: Theory, Methodology, and Methods. Routledge: New York.

McKittrick, K. (2006) Demonic Grounds: Black Women and the Cartographies of           Struggle. University of Minnesota Press: Minneapolis, London.