Postdoctoral Research Associate at the Sheffield Institute of International Development (SIID)
CFP RGS IBG The Shifting Power of Indigeneity: exploring the (co)-production of both rural and urban spaces
The Shifting Power of Indigeneity: exploring the (co)-production of both rural and urban spaces
Call For Papers for RGS IBG annual conference 26-29 August 2014
Sponsored by the Developing Areas Research Group DARG
This session is interested in the multiple and shifting articulations of indigeneity in the contemporary period. It recognises the inherent tensions as well as conflicting understandings of indigeneity, which are articulated and claimed by multiple actors in different countries, histories, political economies and political ecologies. International legislation often defines indigeneity as identity category bound to ancestral claims to land, relationships to nature and collective decision making. These definitions are often criticised by academics, activists, and indigenous peoples themselves for essentialising cultures, removing people’s agency and grouping together different peoples that are, in fact, living in very different circumstances. However, indigeneity is still being used and claimed by many groups as a political category to gain political recognition, power and rights. Both rural and urban groups, often those who feel marginalised and in the minority, rely on indigeneity as a key political category. This session will explore the multiple and contrasting ways in which indigeneity is being used by various socio-political actors, situated in the global South and North, to shift existing power relations and to (co)-produce rural and urban spaces. Using theories that explore the relationship of indigeneity to political power and wider political economies and ecologies, it is interested in analysing how indigeneity is being articulated in conflicts over land and natural resources, in processes of development, in times of rapid planetary urbanisation, and in moments of political unrest and/or change.
We invite papers that investigate the various ways that indigeneity is articulated and mobilised by multiple actors and the ways it is being responded to by states. We want to explore the spatial impact that this is having in the current political economic and ecological contexts. When addressing these aspects, papers should take into account the following questions: In what contexts and how is indigeneity gaining legitimacy and power? How are relations between ‘indigenous’ and ‘non-indigenous’ actors articulated in different spaces? What role does indigeneity play in the (co)-production of different rural and urban places?
Please send 300 word abstract to the session convenors, Jessica Hope and Philipp Horn by the 3rd of February 2014, including your name and contact details
Jessica.Hope-2@postgrad.manchester.ac.uk
Philipp.Horn@postgrad.manchester.ac.uk
For further information about the conference, please see http://www.rgs.org/WhatsOn/ConferencesAndSeminars/Annual+International+Conference/Annual+international+conference.htm
CFP RGS IBG 2014 Collaborative research for an increasingly mobile and ageing world
Collaborative research for an increasingly mobile and ageing world
CFP for RGS IBG annual conference 26-29 August 2014
Sponsored by the Developing Areas Research Group DARG
Tanja Bastia
University of Manchester
Migration has significant consequences for the family members ‘left behind’, not just children but also the elderly. However, thus far the literature on the social consequences of migration for the ‘left behind’ has focused overwhelming on children. In this session we propose to shift the focus towards the elderly. What are the consequences of migration for the older generation? What strategies do they employ to juggle their multiple responsibilities? How are societies and communities reorganised to take into account the absence of the younger generation? In addition, the migration literature has also overlooked the migration of older people. How do older migrants experience work and life abroad? What challenges and satisfactions do they encounter?
The panel seeks innovative studies that push the boundaries of current knowledge on ageing and migration. In addition, it also welcomes studies carried out collaboratively with older people, organisations working with older people such as NGOs or service departments, including action research with a view of discussing alternative research formats that can feed into policy or service provision.
Please send 300 word abstract to Tanja.Bastia@Manchester.ac.uk by 24th January 2014, including your name and contact details.
For further information about the conference, please see http://www.rgs.org/WhatsOn/ConferencesAndSeminars/Annual+International+Conference/Annual+international+conference.htm
New book
New MSc Programme in Environment, Politics and Development to begin September 2014
International Fieldwork in Development Contexts: Postgraduate Training Workshop Newcastle University, 6th-7th February 2013
5th Annual Postgraduate Conference to be held on Tuesday 25th March 2013 at the University of Sheffield
CFP RGS/ IBG Learning from Small Cities: New urban frontiers in the global south
Learning from Small Cities: New urban frontiers in the global south
Ayona Datta (University of Leeds)
Abdul Shaban (Tata Institute of Social Sciences)
For the last decade or so urban studies has been preoccupied in decentring its western bias and advocating a postcolonial lens in studying cities of the global south. Mega-cities such as Mumbai, Shanghai and Johannesburg are now ‘champions of urbanity’ (Banerjee-Guha 2013) in global urban studies. Yet, around half of the ‘urban’ population in Africa, Asia and Latin America lives in small and medium cities with populations of less than 500,000 (Satthertwaite 2006). Seen as provincial, parochial, even communal and on the peripheries of urban studies, small and medium towns nevertheless are the new frontiers of urbanization of postcolonial states. They service urban consumers, act as national trade centres, support global manufacturing processes or serve as regional administrative nodes. In recent years, the focus of postcolonial states on cities as engines of neoliberal development and economic growth (Kennedy and Zerah 2008), has also spurred rapid transformation of small and medium towns into new urban utopias of eco-city, smart-city, satellite city and a number of other corporate sponsored city-making initiatives. They therefore face a “triple challenge” (Veron 2010, 2833) of the impacts of increased urbanization, development and under-development. While they are characterised by the absence of local democratic institutions, poor urban infrastructure and continued ‘elite capture’ (Kundu 2011) of land for development projects, a broad range of grassroots struggles in these places are also working to redefine rights and justice through active citizenships. The indifference in urban scholarship however to the ‘smallness’ of cities have institutionalised existing inequalities between mega- and small cities, between urban regions and their urbanizing hinterlands, and between the centre and peripheries of urban studies itself.
In this session, we view small cities not as homogeneous, structurally and demographically defined entities, but rather as places with their specific social, cultural, political, historical contexts of ‘smallness’ that are produced through their particular relationships with neoliberalisation, globalization, urbanization and the postcolonial state. We invite papers that address but are not limited to the following questions:
- What we can learn from small cities and how can this ‘learning’ decentre the practices of ‘doing’ urban studies?
- What are the new frontiers of knowledge and action that are produced when we learn from small cities?
- What are the politics of being and becoming ‘small’, and what does it mean to challenge the injustices of ‘smallness’ in these cities?
- How do aspirations for ‘bigness’ in small cities produce new urban inequalities?
- How are urbanization of mega-city regions and transformations in the political, cultural, social and economic life of small cities co-produced?
References
Banerjee-Guha, Swapna 2013. ‘Small Cities and Towns in Contemporary Urban Theory, Policy and Praxis’, in R.N. Sharma and R.S. Sandhu (eds), Small Cities and Towns in Global Era: Emerging Changes and Perspectives, 17-35. Jaipur: Rawat Publications.
Kennedy and Zerah, H. 2008. The Shift to City-Centric Growth Strategies: Perspectives from Hyderabad and Mumbai, Economic and Political Weekly, September 27, 110-117.
Kundu, A. 2011. Politics and Economics of Urban Growth, Economic and Political Weekly, May 14, 10-12.
Satthertwaite, D. 2006. Outside the Large Cities; The demographic importance of small urban centres and large villages in Africa, Asia and Latin America. Human Settlements Working Paper Series Urban Change No. 3. IIED, London
Veron, R. 2010. Small Cities, Neoliberal Governance and Sustainable Development in the Global South: A Conceptual Framework and Research Agenda, Sustainabilities, 2, 2833-2848
CFP RGS/ IBG 2014 Entrepreneurship in peri-urban villages: Understanding empowerment and marginalization in the urbanizing global south
RGS-IBG Annual International Conference 2014
London: 26th to 29th August 2014
Call for papers
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Entrepreneurship in peri-urban villages: Understanding empowerment and marginalization in the urbanizing global south
Organizer: Rohit Madan (Cardiff University)
In the global south urbanization is changing the nature of villages, and rural entrepreneurs play an important part in this. Entrepreneurial success requires good roads, labour, communications, technology, skills and (relatively) cheap land (Buciega et al 2009, Tacoli 2006), and these are readily available in the peri-urban fringe, where urbanization is most rapid. This is considered “modernization” and “progress” – a neo-liberal mindset within which the private entrepreneur is embedded.
Private entrepreneurship has been traditionally seen as vital in achieving poverty alleviation – there are several examples of this in studies from: China (Lin 2006, Ma 2002), Tanzania (Lanjouw et al 2001), Indonesia (Leinbach 2003), and India (Eapen 2001), amongst many others. Often government policies have tried to increase the proportion of non-cultivation employment in rural areas to achieve this (Rigg 2006). On the surface entrepreneurship suggests innovation, collaboration and partnerships between the state, civil society and private sector, however, de-regulation gives entrepreneurs increased access over human/natural resources. In the peri-urban fringe therefore the entrepreneur has greater capacity to affect both empowerment and marginalization of rural communities (Kay 2002, Xu and Tan 2002).
In this session we aim to theorize relationships between rural-entrepreneurship and urbanization, shifting the spotlight away from solely the “urban” or the “rural”, but also away from simplistic preconceptions that see urbanization within binary frameworks. We aim to converge strands addressing how entrepreneurship transforms individuals and the community, but also at national/global levels – on how both governance and everyday life are transformed.
We welcome papers connecting urbanization with rural entrepreneurship that deal with (but are not limited to) the following themes:
v How environmental and social justice are linked with entrepreneurship in the global south?
v How entrepreneurship shapes (and is shaped by) multi-level governance and policy?
v How can we theorize the agrarian dimensions of entrepreneurship (i.e. food, labour, multifunctionality, etc.)?
v How is entrepreneurship co-produced (through the nature/type of individual – institutional interactions)?
v How can we theorize the relationships between learning/education and entrepreneurship?
v How does entrepreneurship relate to rural-urban linkages and urbanization?
v Typologies and wider discussions / debates around entrepreneurship?
Please email abstracts of 150 words (max) with full contact details by Friday, 31st January 2014 to Rohit Madan (MadanR@cardiff.ac.uk).