The following special sessions are open for additional submissions. Before submitting your abstract to the pre-conference organisers, you should contact the panel convenors to discuss your paper.
Activism Beyond Binary: Celebrating Difference in and Across Political Mobilisation
Convenors: Anil Sindhwani (Durham) and Sofia Negri (Queen Mary)
Academic research focused on political mobilisation has a tendency to follow binarisms (Takhar 2007): everyday resistance vs organised collective action, autonomous organisation vs party-led organising (Halverson 2020). While these categories are helpful to define and analyse political activity, they also obfuscate the complexity of the ‘doings’ that lie within any form of political activity and among the people who participate in them. This session therefore seeks to better interrogate contradictions and conflicts around…
- Leadership vs lay activism
- Material demands vs structural demands (e.g., Caldeira and Holston 1999)
- Active vs passive mobilising
- Framing(s) of activism (e.g., Martin 2003)
- Organisational forms
Caldeira, T.P.R. and Holston, J. (1999) ‘Democracy and violence in Brazil’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 41(4), pp. 691–729. Available at: https://www.jstor.org/stable/179426
Halvorsen, S. (2020) ‘The geography of political parties: Territory and organisational strategies in Buenos Aires’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 45(2), pp. 242–255. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1111/tran.12343
Martin, D.G. (2003) ‘“Place-framing” as place-making: constituting a neighborhood for organizing and activism’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 93(3), pp. 730–750. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-8306.9303011.
Takhar, S. (2007) ‘Expanding the boundaries of political activism’, Contemporary Politics, 13(2), pp. 123–137. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1080/13569770701562591.
Territories, Identities, and Geographies of Resistance
Convenors: Francesco Ventura (University of Florence) and Maria Chiara Franceschelli (Scuola Normale Superiore)
Multiple geopolitical crises, socio-ecological precarity, and neo-liberal territorial transformations have been bringing to the fore the relevance of socio-territorial resistance (Hughes 2020). Resistance is an act that redesigns the link between people and political/social change, taking place at different scales, from the body to the nation (Pile and Keith 1997). In this sense, it is deeply intertwined with the affirmation of an identity. Since resistance can be considered a political act of counter-power, it involves modes of political subjectivation and territorialisation (Schwarz and Streule 2024). This panel aims to explore the link between territories, identities, and resistance.
IGU Commission on Political Geography 