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 concerning  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.

Venue

Holgate House
Grey College
Durham University
Durham

Workshop location map (.pdf file)

Registration

The conference is free. A limited number of spaces are still available. To register please contact Rachel Pears at:

Durham University
Department of Geography
Science Laboratories
South Road, Durham
DH1 3LE, UK

Tel: 0191 3341927
Fax: 0191 3341801
r.j.pears@durham.ac.uk

The workshop is jointly sponsored by the Politics-State-Space and Lived & Material Cultures research clusters, Department of Geography, Durham University.