Events

RGS-IBG Annual Conference 2024: sponsored sessions

The Gender and Feminist Geographies Research Group (GFGRG) would like to invite expressions of interest for sponsored sessions at the RGS-IBG 2024 Annual Conference. The RGS-IBG Annual International Conference will take place from the evening of Tuesday 27th to Friday 30th August 2024 at the Royal Geographical Society (with IBG) in London and online. 

The conference will be chaired by Professor Stephen Legg (University of Nottingham), and the Chair’s theme is mapping. This theme ‘will explore mapping in all its forms, in a world that is saturated with maps, from historical cartography to the newest technologies and practices of map-making.. More information can be found here

We welcome sessions that address pressing and topical issues relating to gender and feminist geographies, and particularly encourage those directly related to the conference theme.  We are happy to support a range of formats – panels, round tables, Q&As, practitioner forums, films, performances etc., as well as applications for co-sponsored with other research groups. 

You can find the RGS guidelines for session proposals online.   

The deadline for sponsored session proposal submissions to GFGRG has been extended to 23rd February 2024.

Please email queries and submissions to the group’s chair Kate Maclean kate.maclean@ucl.ac.uk including session title (max 15 words) and abstract (max 300 words), name(s) and affiliation(s) of the session convenor(s), and the anticipated format of the session. 

Session convenors will be notified soon after as to whether or not GFGRG will be able to provide sponsorship for the session. We can sponsor up to 12 session slots. Please bear in mind that sessions cannot occupy more than two slots in the whole programme. 

Once a sponsorship decision has been made, convenors will have until 1st March 2024 to provide the full session details (with all proposed papers and presenters) for final submission to the RGS-IBG. 

SPONSORED SESSIONS SO FAR 2024see below for CfP

1. CfP: New and emerging research within Gender and Feminist Geographies

Session Sponsors: Gender and Feminist Geographies Research Group  

DEADLINE for Abstracts – 23rd February 2024, 6pm

These sessions are aimed at postgraduates and early career researchers who would like an opportunity to present their research in a supportive and constructive academic environment and at researchers at all stages of their careers that are interested in presenting papers that actively engage with discussions on current and emerging theoretical or methodological innovations in the field of feminist and gender geography.

‘Gender and Feminist Geographies’ is intended to cover a broad spectrum of research and papers are welcome from any area of feminist and gender geographical inquiry, with the aim of bringing together current and emerging themes, issues and approaches. Papers are especially welcome that connect with this year’s theme of Mapping. Researchers at any stage in their research process are welcome, making the session a great opportunity for early career and postgraduate researchers to gain experience presenting their work. The sessions will also provide a forum to meet and discuss emerging ideas with other researchers in a friendly and relaxed environment, as well as opportunities to explore possibilities and relevance of engaging with feminist theory and methods within research.

Formats:
–  Paper presentations: around 15 minutes with time for questions
–  Snapshot presentations: 5 minutes (with the option to use pictures or creative approaches), followed by an open discussion. Whilst this format is available to anyone, we hope it will provide an opportunity for those not yet ready to present full papers to engage in the conference in a constructive and productive way. This session is also suitable to those wishing to explore the possibilities and relevance of gender and feminist theory to their research.

Send abstracts (or queries) to Kate Maclean (kate.maclean@ucl.ac.uk) on behalf of the GFGRG Committee.

Please include:

・       A title for your presentation;
・       An abstract of max 150 words;
・       Your preference of either a paper presentation or a snapshot presentation;
・       Your name, affiliation and contact details (email address).

Please do get in touch if you have any queries at all or would like to discuss possibilities.

2. RGS-IBG 2024 session abstract: geographies of (non)reproduction 

Organisers: Dr Sneha Krishnan (University of Oxford), Dr Matilda Fitzmaurice (Lancaster University) 

Session sponsored by the Geographies of Children, Youth and Families Research Group and the Gender and Feminist Geographies Research Group.

Session location: hybrid 

Contribution formats: we are happy to accept presentations in a variety of formats. 

Please send your abstracts or other proposals to m.fitzmaurice@lancaster.ac.uk and sneha.krishnan@ouce.ox.ac.uk before midnight on Friday 16th February. 

Abstract 

The year 2024 marks 20 years since the publication of Lee Edelman’s (2004) No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive. This text was decisive in introducing geographers and social and cultural theorists to the figure of the Child as the future, of which queerness is the negation. But what happens when this future becomes increasingly unrecognisable and unpredictable?  

Meanwhile, the increasingly inhospitable environment for ‘family life’ – whether this is the anxiety about marriage rates and a ‘baby bust’, increasingly unaffordable costs of living and housing, or fears about having children due to the climate crisis – and the availability of a discursive framework within which to think of family beyond the reproductive nuclear unit is a topic of live discussion. Non-reproductivity, Eleanor Wilkinson (2020) argues, invites reflection on intimacy rather than family – here including forms of kin-making between friends and co-parents, among childfree and childless adults in paradigms that unsettle how it looks to grow up and live together.  All these phenomena have undersides that are riven with inequalities and domination. The ongoing panic about a ‘baby bust’ and declines in marriage rates in the global North co-exists with racist fears of being ‘swamped’ by migrants from certain countries with high fertility rates (especially in Africa); schools in some highly gentrified areas of London have closed due to declining numbers of children, while others in outer London areas are heavily oversubscribed. This points to the inequities at the heart of social reproduction: as Cindi Katz (2018) argues, the figures of the ‘child as accumulation strategy’ and the ‘child as waste’ are two sides of the same coin. Meanwhile, judgements about what counts as a ‘family’, and about whose families ‘count’, are deeply imbricated with legacies of heteropatriarchal (settler) colonialism, imperialism, and racialised domination. As Martin (2014: 458) has put it, “we become legible as subjects – as humans – in and through the ways in which we perform our families”. Conversations about futures of (re)production, furthermore, are haunted by the ugly spectre and histories of eugenics and population control, which continue today, albeit cloaked in more benign guises (see for e.g. Bhatia et al 2020; Wilson 2017; Wilson & Shaw 2019; Patchin 2021). 

One example that highlights some of the flaws in dominant conceptions of (non)reproduction is that of ‘reproductive anxiety’ related to the climate crisis. The discourse of ‘reproductive anxiety’ contains a series of assumptions. First, it assumes a single shared understanding of what ‘having a child’ means. Second, it is underpinned by an assumption of a shared baseline of reproductive capacity, which is belied by what we know about how Black women in the US are more likely to experience fertility problems – or infertility – than are white women, and the obstacles faced by queer, trans and disabled people in accessing reproductive assistance or state recognition of their status as parent. Second, it presupposes that individual, often biological, parents are uniquely responsible for the future environmental impacts of their children, as well as privatised notions of futurity, i.e., the idea that a child’s safety and well-being is the responsibility of the parents alone (Lewis 2019). How can we reconcile this with the fact that if the climate crisis shows us anything, it shows that entanglements of responsibility are fundamental to our humanity (see Clark and Whittle 2023a, 2023b). 

We invite contributions that consider (non)reproduction as a mode of building communal futurity, queering futurity beyond same-gender attraction, and experiments in anti-capitalist and anti-heteronormative living. How might we think about (non)reproduction in ways that exceed the privatised liberal frameworks of choice and responsibility? How do mid-twentieth century understandings of ‘childless’ people as deviant and stigmatised subjects hold up in the era of the so-called ‘Anthropocene’ and amid ongoing and overlapping crises? What does it mean to live together, make kin together, and envision futurity outside of the heteronormative ideal? How do we cultivate alternative ‘family’ relationships that are not beholden to logics of possession (‘having’ children) or linear, legally sanctioned temporal relationships to the next generation (biological parenthood and inheritance)?  

Potential topics for papers: 

We invite contributions on – but in no way limited to – the following topics: 

  • Coupledom, marriage, (in)fertility, miscarriage, gestation/pregnancy, surrogacy, abortion, child-rearing, adoption, fostering, inheritance… 
  • Reproductive justice struggles in an era of ‘baby bust’ 
  • Historical research on experiments in anti/extra-heteronormative living 
  • Experiments in anti/extra-heteronormative living (e.g. friendship, extended or chosen families, non-monogamy, communalised cohabitation and/or parenting etc.) 
  • Queer and trans futures of (non)reproduction beyond same-gender attraction 
  • Meanings of childlessness in/beyond the ‘Anthropocene’ 

We are happy to be flexible about contribution format, and welcome ways of presenting research that go beyond the conventional academic paper. 

References 

Bhatia R, Sasser JS, Ojeda D, Hendrixson A, Nadimpally S & Foley EE (2020) A feminist exploration of ‘populationism’: engaging contemporary forms of population control. Gender, Place & Culture 27(3), 333-350.  

Edelman L (2004) No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. 

Clark N & Whittle R (2023a) Planetary Rifting and the Paleogeography of Care. Environmental Humanities. Special issue on ‘Earth as Praxis’.  

Clark N & Whittle R (2023b) For a Paleogeography of Childcare: Infant-Carrying Technics on a Dynamic Planet. Environment and Planning F: Philosophy, Theory, Models, Methods and Practice.  

Katz C (2018) The Angel of Geography: Superman, Tiger Mother, aspiration management, and the child as waste. Progress in Human Geography 42(5), 723-740.  

Lewis, S (2021) Full surrogacy now: Feminism against family. London: Verso. 

Martin L (2014) Accounting for the Familial: Discourse, Practice and Political Possibility. ACME: An International E-Journal for Critical Geographies 13(3), 457-462.  

 Patchin PM (2021) For the sake of the child: The economisation of reproduction in the Zika public health emergency. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 46(2), 2-14.  

Eleanor Wilkinson (2020) Never after? Queer temporalities and the politics of non-reproduction, Gender, Place & Culture, 27:5, 660-676, DOI: 10.1080/0966369X.2019.1598941 

Wilson K (2017) Re-centering ‘Race’ in development: Population policies and global capital accumulation in the era of the SDGs. Globalizations 14, 434-449.  

 Wilson K & Shaw A (2019) The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the necro-populationism of ‘climate-smart’ agriculture. Gender Place and Culture 27(3), p. 378.  

PAST EVENTS:

Thursday 21st September 2023: Dealing with knock-backs: Challenging the scripts of ‘failure’ in academia.

The GFGRG is delighted to host the next session in the RGS Mentoring and Professional Development series. This online session will explore positive ways to deal with inevitable ‘failures’ and rejections in academic careers. 

We’ve entitled it Dealing with knock-backs: Challenging the scripts of ‘failure’ in academia, and are very pleased to welcome Dr Luna Clara Muñoz as our speaker. Dr Muñoz is Founder and CEO of Luna Leadership. She has over twenty years’ experience as an academic and consultant, and has set up mentoring programmes in various UK universities to support academics at all career stages. She now works as a consultant and supports academics who want to ‘ditch the academic pipeline’ and put their skills to fulfilling use elsewhere.

More details and registration here – https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/dealing-with-knock-backs-challenging-the-scripts-of-failure-in-academia-tickets-689883729807?aff=oddtdtcreator

RGS-IBG Annual Conference 2023

The RGS-IBG Annual International Conference took place from the evening of Tuesday 29 August to Friday 1 September 2023 at the Royal Geographical Society (with IBG) in London and online.

The conference was chaired by Professor Harriet Bulkeley (University of Durham), with the theme ‘Climate changed geographies.’

**Check out our conference blog here and follow our conference blogger Poppy Budworth as she takes over our twitter account @GFG_RGSIBG!**

The RGS conference programme and the GFGRG events can be found here

This year we sponsored the following sessions:

Wednesday 30th August

Sketching out Contours of Feminist Political Ecology, 1410-1550, RGS-IBG Council Room

Gendered resistances to violence: activism and research (1) 0900-1040 (2) 1110-1250 (3), 1410-1550, Skempton Building Room 301.

Care and ‘crises’: Reimagining 21st Century challenges through a feminist lens, 1110-1250, Zoom Only.

Thursday 31st August

Decolonialism, knowledge production and GRRIPP funded efforts, 1410-1550, RGS-IBG Education Centre (Hybrid).

Constellations of Co-Resistance: Reorienting Alternative Forms of Resistance (1), 1410-1550, RGS-IBG Drayson Room (Hybrid) and (2) 1620-1800, ICL – Sir Alexander Fleming Building Room 120 (In-person only).

Mapping feminist approaches to climate change education (1) 1410-1550 (2) 1620-1800, RGS-IBG Tea Room.

Friday 1st September

New and emerging research within Gender and Feminist Geographies (1) 0900-1040, ICL – SALC (Sherfield Building) Room 6 (In-person only) and (2) 1110-1250 RGS-IBG Drayson Room (Hybrid).

Vulnerable groups shaping Latin American cities (1) 1410-1550, (2) 1620-1800. Zoom Only.

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