RGS-IBG Annual International Conference, London, 28th – 30th August 2019
Papers are warmly invited to the following session.
Chemical kinships
Conveners:
Angeliki Balayannis, Brunel University London (
angeliki.balayannis@brunel.ac.uk)
Emma Garnett, King’s College London (emma.garnett@kcl.ac.uk)
Session sponsor:
Participatory Geographies Research Group
Abstract:
A chemical turn is taking place across the social sciences and humanities.
This bourgeoning field of research is increasingly approaching industrial
chemicals ontologically, as heterogeneous material entanglements. These
situated attunements to chemical relations and conditions are stimulating
new conceptual developments, including: chemical kinship (Agard-Jones
2013); chemical geographies (Romero et al. 2017); the chemosphere (Shapiro
2015); chemical space (Barry 2005); and chemo-ethnography (Shapiro and
Kirksey 2017). This session considers what a geographical approach to
chemicals generates conceptually, empirically, and ethically. Geography has
largely taken the materialities of industrial chemicals for granted – often
reducing them to villainous objects. By approaching the spatiotemporalities
of chemicals through their enabling and constraining capacities, this
session considers the ways shared exposures afford new political
possibilities (Alaimo 2016; Murphy 2006).
Divided into two complementary parts, the first is a paper session
exploring chemical entanglements in embodied, material, and affective
registers. The second is an open session that puts these ideas into
practice, through a participatory workshop for cultivating attunements to
chemical kinships in London – exploring bodily relations with chemicals,
ranging from antibiotics to air pollutants to plastics. Our point of
departure for this final session is Povinelli’s key question (2017: 508):
‘How does one probe and discover the world that one is in, but can
experience only peripherally?’.
We invite papers that explore chemical worlds from different fields of
research, including but not exclusively:
- Material politics and cultures
- More-than-human geographies
- Feminist technoscience and STS
- Discard studies
- Environmental (in)justice
- Creative geographies and artistic practice
Instructions for authors:
Please submit an abstract (max. 250 words) with institutional affiliation
and email address to both Angeliki Balayannis (
angeliki.balayannis@brunel.ac.uk) and Emma Garnett (emma.garnett@kcl.ac.uk)
by 8th February 2019. Indicate which author will present at the conference
and make note of any specific AV or access requirements. Please get in
touch if you have any questions or ideas about alternative forms of
presentation.
Call for papers deadline:
Friday, 8th February 2019
More information on the conference:
https://www.rgs.org/research/annual-international-conference/
References:
Agard-Jones, V (2013) Bodies in the system. Small Axe 17(3): 182-192.
Alaimo, S (2016) Exposed: Environmental Politics and Pleasures in
Posthuman Times. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
Barry, A (2005) Pharmaceutical Matters. Theory, Culture & Society 22(1):
51-69.
Murphy, M (2006) Sick Building Syndrome and the Problem of Uncertainty:
Environmental Politics, Technoscience, and Women Workers. Durham, NC: Duke
University Press.
Povinelli, E A (2017) Fires, fogs, winds. Cultural Anthropology 32(4):
504-513.
Romero, A M et al. (2017) Chemical Geographies. GeoHumanities 3(1):
158-177.
Shapiro, N (2015) Attuning to the chemosphere: Domestic formaldehyde,
bodily reasoning, and the chemical sublime. Cultural Anthropology 30(3):
368-393.
Shapiro, N and E Kirksey (2017) Chemo-ethnography: An introduction. Cultural
Anthropology 32(4): 481-493.
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