IAG Conference 2017 - Session Overview

Conference Parallel Session Overview

AusMob: The Future Of Australian Mobilities

Theme: Cultural, Economic, Rural & Urban Geography (Sponsored by Cultural Geography Study Group)

Thomas Birtchnell, University of Wollongong; David Bissell, The Australian National University; Michelle Duffy, Federation University Australia; Farida Fozdar, University of Western Australia; Benjamin Iaquinto, University of Melbourne; David Radford, University of South Australia and Lauren Rickards, RMIT University

This session showcases the breadth of Australian geographical research being undertaken on ‘mobilities’, broadly conceived. In tandem with the launch of AusMob, the Australian Mobilities Research Network, this session explores what (im)mobility means for Australia, in which the mobilities in question encompass not only humans but many other (im)mobile entities, including more-than-humans, capital, technologies or ideas. What diverse modes of theorising, practicing, writing and teaching mobilities are taking place, and could take place, in Australia? What sorts of problems are and could mobilities research in Australia respond to? How do the distinctive institutional capacities in Australia create specific ways of doing mobilities research? While we invite papers from researchers that showcase their current work on mobilities, we are keen to reflect on the opportunities and challenges of the future of mobilities research in Australia.

Australian Wetland Palaeoecology Through Time

Theme: Physical Geography

Patrick Moss, The University of Queensland

Australia contains are number of wetlands (i.e. lakes, swamps and marshes) that provide important archives of past climates and human impact over thousands of years, which can provide a great deal of insight into how landscapes may respond to future environmental changes (e.g. climate change and human development pressure). These wetlands are also very important in terms of their own ecological and aesthetic values, as well as their capacity to store carbon. Most Australian wetland palaeoecological research has been focussed on eastern Australia, particularly Atherton Tableland, northeast Queensland, the giant sand masses of south east Queensland, the Australian Alps, western Victoria and western Tasmania. This session aims to bring those researching palaeoecological aspects of Australian wetlands, particularly those exploring novel proxies, new sites that are away from the traditional study areas and/or directly linking palaeoecological data with natural resource management.

Cities And Climate Change

Theme: Legal and Urban Geography (Sponsored by Urban Geography Study Group/Legal Geography Study Group)

Tayanah O'Donnell, University of Canberra

Australia’s population density is significantly urban and coastal. Predicted climate change in the next century and beyond threatens to change urban life as we know it. Affecting issues as diverse as food, housing and transport, climatic change and associated environmental problems will impact all the systems that keep our cities functioning. Significant mitigation and adaptation measures will be required to meet these new challenges. Across our urban regions, both coastal and inland, these challenges will be shaped by geographic specificities but will interact across spatial and institutional boundaries. The challenges will also be felt in systems at local, regional and national levels and require action across these competing governance scales.

Cohabiting And Confronting Interstitial Spaces And Landscapes

Theme: Urban Geography

Ashraful Alam and Donna Huston, Macquarie University

Interstitial spaces are defined as spaces that are not deliberately planned but generated as the by-product of conscious human design. The term is used in a wide range of disciplines including architecture, planning, and urban and cultural geography. David Harvey and Doreen Massey use ‘interstitial’ to define the dynamic condition of unfolding creative resistance (and recalcitrance) to the dominant material logics of space, power and capital. Matthew Gandy uses 'interstitial' and 'unintentional' to highlight spontaneous 'unguarded spaces' where 'both ecological and socio-cultural diversity can flourish.' Similarly, Emma Power uses the term 'liminal' to emphasis the surprising and unintended encounters in the 'more-than-human' home. This session is open to scholars working with/or in interstitial, unintended and liminal spaces (or landscapes) and scholars currently exploring the potential of thinking with interstitial spaces as an emergent form of more-than-human co-becoming.

Collective Action In Rural Australia

Theme: Rural Geography

Sonia Graham, UNSW

Many challenging environmental problems are transboundary in nature and require the cooperation of diverse actors. In rural and regional areas this includes the fair distribution of scarce water resources, the creation of wildlife corridors, the control of invasive plants and animals, among others. The aim of this session is to explore the social dynamics of such transboundary problems, with an emphasis on opportunities and challenges to collective action.

This session welcomes contributions that consider transboundary challenges in rural and regional Australia and New Zealand. While there is an emphasis on environmental challenges, the organisers welcome contributions that consider other types of transboundary challenges that speak to the nature of rural collective action.

Contemporary Themes In Critical Development Studies

Theme: Critical Development (Sponsored by Critical Development Study Group)

Phoebe Everingham, Paul Hodge and Sarah Wright, University of Newcastle

Development is a highly contested practice, rationale and imaginary. The myriad power configurations of development both constrain and enable across the majority and minority worlds as the meanings and practices of development continue to have significant effects. And while development’s technologies, networks and processes remain problematic, it endures through its tantalising promise of hope. This session invites contributions across a broad range of contemporary themes relevant to development and its problematisation. Papers may include topics such as:

Development networks and foreign aid
Migration and development
Borders transgressed, maintained and created by development practices
International development in a post-Trump world
Emerging methodologies in and pedagogies of development
Tourism Geographies
Resilience and development
The Sustainable Development Goals
Gender dimensions and development
Development policy interventions
Indigenous-led geographies of development
Activism and development
Marginality, exclusion, empowerment and development
More-than-human assemblages and development materialities
Environmental justice and development
Affect and emotions as post-development practice
Hopeful and strengths-based approaches in development

Contrarians' Corner

Theme: Critical Development

David Wadley, The University of Queensland

A discussion session for those who have forsaken fixed ideologies, subscribed to doubt or can simply no longer believe.

Critical Geographies Of Climate Change Adaptation And Development In Oceania

Theme: Critical Development (Sponsored by Critical Development Study Group)

Sophie Webber, University of Sydney and Andrew McGregor, Macquarie University

The islands of our neighbouring region are climate hotspots: They are subject to both the extreme risks of climate change impacts as well as to extensive experimentation in climate change adaptation and development interventions. The small island states of the Pacific region expose the limits of adaptation, stressing this transformational program of change, as well as inviting insights into how to live on the edges of climate change. These sites, therefore, are essential to understanding new constellations and contradictions of international assistance and climate interventions. As such, this session invites papers that explore the critical and relational geographies of climate change adaptation and development in Oceania. In particular, we seek papers that make critical, and theoretically informed, contributions to understanding the limits, contradictions, imaginaries, and potentials of climate change adaptation and development programs and policies. Topics could include, but are certainly not limited to:

Theorising political economic, socio-environmental, and climatological vulnerability in small island states
Exploring the relational geographies of climate and development in Pacific Islands
Understanding the limits and potentials of climate change adaptation and development at a time of climate-denial and international withdrawal and reticence
Developing socio-political strategies oriented at building resilience and international solidarity with Pacific Island Countries affected by climate change
Interrogating discursive representations and imaginaries of climate change in the Pacific and their material impacts
Tracing how Pacific Island Countries are already effected by climate change ecologically, culturally, socially and politically

Critical Reappraisals Of Energy: From Policy To Political Economy

Theme: Economic Geography

Sangeetha Chandrashekeran, University of Melbourne

Major changes in energy production, distribution and consumption are a feature of the contemporary socio-political and economic landscape. Technocratic and activist accounts of the ‘problem’ and its ‘solutions’ proliferate and intertwine, but the underlying structural analysis remains weak. Stepping back from these instrumental approaches, critical geographical accounts of energy have focused on the evolving relationship between states and markets. They ask how the interactions of states and markets shape energy infrastructures and practices, and how state and market formations, and wider processes of regional development, are shaped by energy as a ‘fundamental background to modern everyday life’ (Graham, 2010)?

This session invites papers that focus on energy and its associated institutions, networks, socio-technical artefacts and lived practices to make contributions on broader questions of political economy. The questions it asks centre on the contradictions and complementarities amongst states and markets in energy transformations. More specific questions are:

How does energy, broadly conceived, link to the changing character of political economy (Mitchell, 2011)?
How is the political economy of energy being transformed by ecological imperatives?
How does a study of energy illuminate the changing role of the state and state-mediated institutions?
How will the politics of energy play out in post-political (Swyngedouw, 2010) or anti-political (Clarke, 2012) contexts?
How will post-Brexit populism, as reaction to technocratic rule, transform debates about energy security and energy poverty?
How do the characteristics of state administration and governance, such as Australia's federal structure, influence the trajectories of change and the penetration of market models of energy provision?
What are the socio-political and economic implications of innovative new forms of provision (for example data-driven energy service provision and distributed privately-owned generation)?

Abstracts that address these or related questions about the political economy of energy are sought.

Critical Urban Greening

Theme: Urban Geography

Benjamin Cooke and Ellen van Holstein, University of Wollongong

Based on environmental benefits, support for urban greening is growing. Yet, urban political ecologists caution that benefits and harms are always unevenly distributed. Thus, greening targets must be complemented with a critical awareness of urban greening processes and politics. We welcome papers that address such questions along lines of gender, class, age and indigeneity. We are also interested in the agency involved in greening and in the potential of greening to challenge categories such as ‘human’, ‘urban’, ‘public’ and ‘weed’. We seek to take the claims of nonhumans seriously in urban greening initiatives and ask how this informs a new understanding of relationships between private and public green spaces. The session aims to formulate a progressive urban greening agenda for Australia, through overarching questions such as what kinds of nature are worthwhile producing, who might be involved in this production and to whose benefit do urban greening initiatives work?

Current Directions In Animal Geography

Theme: Animal Geography

Lisel O'Dwyer, CQUniversity and Matthew Coxhill, University of Newcastle

The study of animals within geography is gaining momentum in Australia. This session will provide a vehicle for dissemination of work addressing relationships between animals, humans and environments (whether urban or rural, social, cultural, historical, physical, political or economic) and at any scale. But this sub-discipline is not without challenges. In particular is the question of applying methodologies that provide a foundation for more-than-human exploration.

Difference And Affective Ecologies Of Place: Experimenting With Creative Knowledges Of Belonging And Coexistence

Theme: Cultural Geography (Sponsored by Cultural Geography Study Group/Urban Geography Study Group)

Michele Lobo, Deakin University; Michelle Duffy, University of Newcastle and Kaya Barry, Deakin University

Given the limitations of western scientific policy responses to climate change, we ask what are the tensions and possibilities for integrating Indigenous, and non-western knowledges of belonging and ethical coexistence to transform our relationship to the earth? This place-based knowledge conceptualises the nonhuman as ‘materially constitutive of the possibilities of life’ on earth and is crucial to move thinking away from romantic or dehumanizing notions of ‘nature’ (Yusoff 2015: 5; Head 2016). It interrogates the nature/culture split, values diverse modes of existence and speaks back to top-down planning approaches underpinned by land-based imaginations and histories of imperialism (Steinberg 2011; Carter 2013; Mukherjee 2014). Co-creating alternative politics of belonging and co-existence involves multi-sensuous and often unexpected encounters that are fundamental to the constitution of place, identity and subjectivity. Within these moments, affective, emotional and bodily resonances draw attention to the multiplicity of place-based knowledges that are formed and re-formed through encounters. Given the vulnerability and fragility of human and nonhuman life is at the forefront of global policy agendas of inclusion, yet global leaders are rapidly denying anthropocentric climate change, it is necessary to explore the often overlooked diversity of our actions (Coaffee 2013; Gibson et al. 2015).

Presenters are invited to explore relevant themes such as:

Knowing place and communicating knowledge through interdisciplinary and creative techniques
Affective ecologies, life/non-life and the fabric of place
Vulnerability, belonging and coexistence
Lively infrastructures, mobility and urban aesthetics
Emotion, affect and community resilience
Difference, cultural justice and the politics of climate change denial

We welcome papers or presentation of creative research methods that address these themes.

Doing Digital Geographies

Theme: Cultural Geography

Robyn Mayes, Queensland University of Technology

Digital technologies are increasingly ubiquitous and embedded in everyday life, in differentiated ways, for a growing number of people. These technologies and their multiple articulations have important spatial dimensions just as a geographical lens is crucial to a nuanced understanding of their implications and possible futures. In seeking to bring together scholars with an interest in the geographies of digital technologies, this session is intended to be wide-ranging. Conceptual, methodological and/or empirical papers are invited that might engage with, for example, the ways in which digital technologies are implicated in:

everyday experiences of place;
representations and performances of embodied and/or virtual mobilities;
bodily practices;
(multi-scalar) new social movements;
geographies of work and organisation (eg the platform/gig economy);
the practice of qualitative research; and
reproductions of, or challenges to social injustices and discriminatory practices.

Economic Geography And The Innovation Agenda

Theme: Economic Geography

Jenny Cameron, University of Newcastle and Kirsten Martinus, University of Western Australia

The notion of an “innovation agenda” currently has political and public appeal. But beyond the rhetoric what does this mean? In what ways are firms innovating? How is innovation enacted in different types of firms in different sectors of the economy? To what extent is innovation itself a driver of change or is innovation the outcome of other processes (including, for example, creativity, ethical commitments and concerns, and the transmission of ideas)? What role does government play in supporting innovation; when is government an enabler or a blocker? Innovation is one thing, but how does the commercialisation process work in Australia and elsewhere? What might current theoretical concerns have to offer ways of understanding the innovation agenda (for example, how might reconceiving individual firms as part of an assemblage shed different light on the notion of innovation). This session invites contributions on these and other topics related to the innovation agenda.

Encountering Feminist Geographies

Theme: Feminist Geographies

Ashraful Alam, Tasmin Dilworth, Jess McLean, Nicole McNamara and Natalie Osborne, Macquarie University

An encounter can involve meeting someone or something unexpectedly: so how do feminist geographies and spatial imaginaries allow surprising connections or ‘meetings’? We’re curious about ways in which the conference theme of ‘Geography Counts’ can be seen through multiple feminist geographic perspectives. In this CFP, we’re inviting contributions that explore aspects of the suggestion that, in diverse ways, encountering feminist geographies has offered productive interventions, and challenges, to how geography works. Feminist geographic methods are diverse and range from techniques that draw on feminist-informed praxis to explicit activist research agendas (Johnston, 2016; McLean, Maalsen and Grech, 2016).

This session invites contributions that consider the following questions (as well as others that participants think may relate to encountering feminist geographies):

How are researchers using feminist geographic research methods in Australia/the Southern Hemisphere?
What approaches are researchers taking to understand gender-based differences in their research?
Have feminist geographic approaches become ‘mainstream’ or are they subsumed or renamed for strategic purposes?
What gaps exist in geographic research with respect to understanding gender related issues and/or feminist geographic methods?
How do examinations of gender intersect with other aspects of difference in spaces and places?
How is an intersectional approach to difference being pursued in geographic research?
Who is doing feminism, why and how?
What sorts of activist tropes are being analysed by feminist geographers?
In what ways are researchers challenging the normative framing of policy-directed outcomes from geographic research?
For feminist scholars with an emancipatory axiology, what does ‘impact’ look like, and can we ‘count’ what counts?
How can feminist research praxis and pedagogies exist within, challenge, and/or subvert, the neoliberal and increasingly exploitative landscape of the university sector?
How does our ‘encounter’ with non-humans disrupt the research practice/ approach/ method in feminist geographies?
How does rethinking 'more-than-human' relations illuminate feminist geographical understanding of 'intersectionality' and may produce new 'knowledges' out of the intersections of body-city, home-workplace, urban-nature, private-public so on and so forth?

Environment And Development In China

Theme: Environmental Sustainability and Development Geography

Alex Lo, University of Hong Kong and Kevin Lo, Hong Kong Baptist University

China is in its fourth decade since the ‘open and reform’ policy was adopted in the late 1970s. Yet, the country has come to a critical period of transition as the economy has demonstrated clear signs of losing momentum after decades of fast growth. China continues to struggle to overcome many environmental and development challenges. The ability of China to overcome these problems remains to be seen, as the slowing down of economic growth will make room for a new development pathway and might create both opportunities and challenges. This session will bring together current research on intertwined environmental and development issues of China. We are interested in what new environmental and development challenges the ongoing transition has presented, and how the current ones are being dealt with in a changing context. We welcome contributions addressing any dimension of the environment-development nexus.

Environmental Security In The Anthropocene

Theme: Environmental Sustainability

Tobias Ide, University of Melbourne

The era of the Anthropocene is characterized by massive human impacts on geological and ecological systems. The associated changes can have severe implications for the security of individuals, communities, nation states, regions and eventually the planet. The study of these implications constitutes the dynamic research field of environmental security. The goal of this session is to discuss new insights on environmental security and to relate so far separated streams of research to each other. Contributions can address several topics, including (but not limited to):

Adverse impact of environmental changes and resource exploitation on human individuals, communities and states.
Conflict and cooperation about as well as the management of natural resources on local, national and international levels.
Impacts and injustices related to land/water grabbing, nuclear materials, chemical hazards, genetic modification and geoengineering.

Environmental Sustainability: Does Anyone Care Anymore?

Theme: Environmental Sustainability (Sponsored by Environmental Sustainability Study Group)

Robyn Bartel, University of New England

At a time when planetary boundaries for Earth's capacity to support us are being exceeded we are also, somewhat perversely, facing a pushback of denial rather than mobiisation of action to address critical global issues including land degradation, biodiversity loss and climate change. Hard won legislative protections are being eroded and economic growth pursued above all else. What can we as geographers do about this. Does anyone care about environmental sustainability anymore? All contributions - descriptive, empirical, analytical, critical - are welcome.

Frontiers Of Ecological And Environmental Justice: Who And What Counts?

Theme: Environmental Sustainability

Jason Byrne, Griffith University

Environmental justice and to a lesser extent ecological justice have been mainstays of geographic research in the United States for the past two decades. But much less attention has been given to the unequal distribution of environmental benefits and harms upon marginalised and disadvantaged groups in Australia (e.g. remote Aboriginal communities, neighbourhoods adjacent toxic waste sites, urban heat exposure etc.). Even less attention has been given to the intersections between environmental justice and ecological justice (i.e. disproportionate burden of environmental harm on humans and non-humans). In the Anthropocene, both are oftentimes imbricated. This session explores the issue of who and what counts in environmental and ecological justice research in Australia. Contributions are welcomed from scholars and activists investigating diverse socio-ecological inequalities including, but not limited to, coal seam gas, waste, heat, water contamination, air pollution and the like.

Geographies Of Diversity And National Identity: Challenges, Transformations And Opportunities

Theme: Cultural Geography (Sponsored by Cultural Geography Study Group)

Kevin Dunn and Alanna Kamp, University of Western Sydney

This session reports on geographical research on diversity and national identity, and the challenges, transformations and opportunities that are arising within contemporary multicultural contexts. International flows of asylum seekers, Islamophobia, marginalisation of ethnic-minority and Aboriginal youth, and racism are some of the challenging issues. The ways in which communities respond to such issues can, however, provide avenues for transformation and opportunities for positive outcomes. The challenges, transformations and opportunities for diverse communities are deeply geographical—being based in notions of national identity and bounded subjectivities, influenced by spatialised global flows and discourses, and resulting in everyday impacts ‘in place’. Therefore, what are the contemporary geographical insights for the work of diversity management, and what theoretical and empirical contributions can help leverage the opportunities of diversity?

Geospatial Technologies Informing Australia’s Environmental Strategies And Policies: Leading Practices

Theme: Environmental Sustainability

Graciela Metternicht, UNSW; Bek Christensen, TERN AusCover/The University of Queensland; Alex Held, TERN Auscover/CSIRO and Stuart Phinn, The University of Queensland

Australia’s TERN AusCover delivers earth observation data and products from satellite and airborne imagery, linked to field observations, that measure and monitor key land-surface and environmental characteristics. This session will focus on how environmental monitoring and management activities can use AusCover products; e.g. supporting bushfire management, carbon emissions trading, pollen monitoring for public health benefits, natural resource management. We welcome submissions that show case different Auscover TERN applications, as well as other applied research on environmental and policy management assisted by remote sensing.

Legal Geography And Environment

Theme: Legal Geography

Nicole Graham, University of Technology Sydney

This session brings together the work of legal geographers whose research deals with the interrelationship between law and place. The session combines the theoretical work of legal geography, property theory and environmental law, with concrete applications to particular places, environments and legal problems.

More-Than-Human Research Praxis: Doing More With More-Than-Humans

Theme: Cultural Geography (Sponsored by Cultural Geography Study Group)

Sarah Robertson, Benjamin Cooke, Lauren Rickards and Cecily Maller, RMIT University

Recent geographical scholarship has simultaneously called for and increasingly recognised the agency of the more-than-human beings that make the world. Innovative scholarship in this space is moving toward more explicitly engaging with and understanding human-more-than-human “entanglements” (Ginn 2014). More-than-human theories call on researchers to speak with more-than-humans rather than for them; to elevate the agency and role of more-than-humans in how these entanglements are constituted and enacted. In a recent review of such work, Dowling et al. (2016) argue that geographical scholarship on more-than-humans has primarily focused on theory, and the challenge remains to move beyond theoretical engagements to ""'do' more with more-than-humans” in the realm of research praxis. So, what might research that speaks with more-than-humans actually look like? This session is a call for work that engages with the call to find “ways to decentre human control of research processes and embrac[e] the messy-ness of entangled worlds"" (Dowling et al., 2016, p3).

We are interested in two levels at which more-than-human worlds affect research methodologies and praxis. The first is in how more-than-humans affect and make the worlds that we seek to research. The second is the in the way more-than-humans affect research processes and experiences, shaping the knowledge humans produce in often unnoticed ways. One example might be weather, which has long been the subject of research in human geography in regard to its material and more-than-human affects. Yet it also affects field work, directly through shaping what it is possible to do, when and where, and indirectly through its presence in conversations and data making with human participants. This includes distant more-than-human worlds too, such as the long-distant teleconnected effects of climatic events that shape our places of research and work in difficult to discern ways. We invite papers that directly engage in the challenges and rewards of researching and researching with more-than-humans. This encompasses both the living world of biotic agents, as well as the world of the abiotic, inert and the dead. Papers that consider some of the challenges of working with more-than-humans and how these have been overcome or responded to in empirical work are most welcome.

More-Than-Human Research Praxis: Doing More With More-Than-Humans (PANEL DISCUSSION)

Theme: Cultural Geography (Sponsored by Cultural Geography Study Group)

Sarah Robertson, Benjamin Cooke, Lauren Rickards and Cecily Maller, RMIT University

NOT ACCEPTING ABSTRACTS

Recent geographical scholarship has called for and increasingly recognised the agency of the more-than-human beings that make the world. Scholarship in this space is moving toward more explicitly engaging with and understanding human-more-than-human entanglements. More-than-human theories call on researchers to speak with more-than-humans rather than for them; to elevate their agency and see how human-more-than-human entanglements are constituted and enacted. Yet the challenge remains to move beyond theory to “do more” with more-than-humans in research praxis (Dowling et al., 2016). In this panel discussion, invited scholars engaged in such research will reflect on the ways research is and might “decentre human control of research processes and embrac[e] the messy-ness of entangled worlds" (ibid., p3), as well as the implications of such moves for research methodology and praxis.

New Directions In Cultural Geography

Theme: Cultural Geography (Sponsored by Cultural Geography Study Group)

Michele Lobo, Deakin University; Danielle Drozdzewski, UNSW and David Bissell, Australian National University

Cultural geography comprises a wide-ranging group of geographical sub-disciplines. Cultural domains of geographical research continue to grow in breadth and depth, with expanding theoretical formulations, methodological approaches and fields of interest. Cultural geographers embrace the material, discursive and sensory moments of spatiality. These cultural dimensions are increasingly recognised across the full spectrum of geographical research, as seen in the emergence and growing popularity of such concepts as cultural economy, cultural politics, cultural ecology and nature-cultures. The vitality and range of cultural geography invites regular reflection. Accordingly, in this session we provide a forum to showcase recent cutting-edge research in cultural geography in Australia, New Zealand and beyond.

Organisations Expanding The Boundaries Of Citizenship

Theme: Urban and Cultural Geography (Sponsored by Cultural Geography Study Group/Urban Geography Study Group)

Thea Hewitt, University of Melbourne and Nicole Cook, University of Wollongong

This session focuses on the role that organisations (such as local councils, libraries, drop in centres, advocacy groups, community health providers and more) play in expanding the boundaries of citizenship. Organisations such as these are often sites of social provisioning and therefore warrant greater attention in post-welfarist, neoliberal cities. Whether or not such organisations can challenge regressive forms of citizenship and neoliberalist urbanism to foster an alternative politics of care are key questions the session aims to explore.
Suggested themes:

The nature of organisations involved in social provisioning for diverse groups
Capacities of organisations to foster an emancipatory politics
The spatial distribution of organisations; organisationally rich/poor areas
Organisational responses to neoliberalising logics
Organisational philosophies, values, and ethics: their nature and influence

Politics Of Measurement And Evaluation In Development During Resistance And Populism

Theme: Critical Development (Sponsored by Critical Development Study Group)

Sophie Webber, University of Sydney

Like many political and policy worlds, the development arena has seen a growing demand for measurement, evaluation, and evidence. This includes a shift from global development hegemon, the World Bank, to demand a transformation in development practice towards sharing global ‘solutions’ and best-practices, as well as the increasing deployment of medical-inspired randomized control trials for generating development economic knowledge. Within the industry, the scientization of development is acclaimed as a necessary method to ensure effectiveness and efficiency in aid spending. Moreover, best-practice designations and experimental evidence are routinely represented as objective and legitimate. At the same time, scientific and development expertise has been subject to critique from anti-elitist and populist movements, as well as by critical scholars and resistance movements.
Given this conjuncture, this session seeks contributions that engage with the politics of measurement, evaluation and evidence-based policy in the development industry. Potential questions and topics include:

Which, and whose, development knowledge counts? How does development knowledge become hegemonic?
How is technical development expertise mobilized, and what kinds of development interventions does it engender?
Who is challenging the centrality of technocratic development expertise, and to what ends?
Can measurement and evaluations be harnessed for progressive political and developmental ends?

Practising Paradox: Decolonising Urban Geographies From The Settler-Colonial University (PANEL DISCUSSION)

Theme: Urban Geography (Sponsored by Urban Geography Study Group/Indigenous Peoples’ Knowledges and Rights Study Group/Critical Development Study Group)

Libby Porter, RMIT University; Tod Jones, Curtin University and Shaphan Cox, Curtin Univeristy

NOT ACCEPTING ABSTRACTS

The question of decolonisation raises a series of paradoxes in the context of urban geographical scholarship in settler-colonial universities. The city is an emblematic location of settler privilege and the institutions of the academy hardly innocent of sustaining those very same structures of privilege. So what, then, might it look and feel like to attempt to practice decoloniality about the city, from the site of university-based scholarship in settler-colonial contexts?

This panel discussion will address questions including: how spaces within university systems be created to practice community-based, justice-oriented, activist scholarship; and what might be the ethics, politics and practices that can transform urban geographical scholarship in settler-colonies?

The panel discussants are being finalized and will include both Indigenous and non-Indigenous activists and scholars

Research Ethics And The Neoliberal University

Theme: Research Practice

Roger Baars and Karen Fisher, University of Auckland

Geographers have emphasised that ethics in practice are broader in scope than ethics protocols within universities. While this has stimulated debate about research practices and the ethical considerations underlying them, we call for greater attention to be given to the effects of formal ethics protocols on research design and conduct. The constraints imposed by ethics protocols can lead some researchers to choose ‘safe’ research projects that are easy to ‘get through ethics’, some to ignore the requirement to seek ethics approval, and some to ‘bend’ the rules to better accommodate the complexities of doing social research. We invite papers that engage with recent debates around ethics in research, ethical research practices, and empirical accounts of negotiating ethics in practice. Themes: What is ethical research? Negotiating formal processes with research realities; Ethics and care beyond institutional approval; The effects of audit culture on ethics and ethical research.

Researching With Indigenous Peoples

Theme: Indigenous Peoples’ Knowledges and Rights

Jess McLean, Macquarie University

This session invites researchers to share and discuss their current research engaging with Indigenous peoples’ rights and knowledges. As a general call for papers, we’re keen to hear about the diverse human, environmental and physical geographic research that is happening in Australia and elsewhere that is involving Indigenous peoples.

We welcome contributions which foreground the inspiring work Indigenous peoples are doing asserting their rights and knowledges, which grapple with the challenges of conducting ethical work in power laden contexts, which research the ‘post’colonial processes constraining decolonising processes, and which challenge conventional understandings and assumptions in geography and elsewhere to open productive spaces of engagement and transformation.

Resist, Refuse And Re-Common! Critical And Creative Geographies Of Activism

Theme: Urban Geography

Donna Houston and Jessica McLean, Macquarie University

The performativity and political constitution of activist spaces and spaces of activism is a long-standing theme in critical geographical scholarship concerned with the production of social injustices, and the possibilities for collective action and transformation. Alongside more ‘traditional’ forms of organising characteristic of many mainstream social and political movements, geographers explore the diverse spatial, emotional, material, embodied, cosmopolitical and ‘more-than-representational’ forms that activism takes. The latter work especially focuses on the multiple, contingent, collaborative, storied, intersectional, experimental, artistic and everyday contexts of activist work in creating ‘common’ worlds and sustaining just and vibrant forms of public life. We are looking forward to hearing from people who are, or have been, researching and co-producing critical and creative sites of resistance, refusal and re-commoning.

Revisiting, Reframing And Reaffirming Tourism Geographies: Critical Post-Disciplinarity Perspectives

Theme: Tourism Geography, Cultural Geography, Critical Development, Environmental Sustainability and Indigenous Peoples' Knowledges and Rights

Joseph M Cheer, Monash University and Alan A Lew, Northern Arizona University

At the intersection between geography and tourism lies tourism geography, multivalent in its connotations and intra/trans/cross disciplinary drawing from physical, human, cultural and economic geographies. Papers will revisit, reframe and reaffirm the place of tourism geographies within its parent discipline (Lew, 1999) and within a post-disciplinarity framework (Coles, Hall & Duval, 2016).

In doing so, Pearce’s (2000) line of enquiry is evoked:

How might a national geography of tourism best be characterized?
What factors shape a national geography of tourism?
What are the implications of the existence of national geographies of tourism for the overall development of the geography of tourism?

Papers will draw on both critical empirical and conceptual underpinnings of people, place and space through a tourism geography lens, and exemplify post-disciplinarity as a hallmark of contemporary tourism geographies.

Risks Of The Rural-Urban Interface

Theme: Hazards, Risks and Disasters and Rural Geography

Lauren Rickards, RMIT University and Sonia Graham, UNSW

Escalating risks such as bushfires and injustices such as industrial pollution demand that scholars direct increased attention to the rural-urban interface. But in relooking at this troubled zone, more than a visit to the city limit is required. For one thing, the location of the interface and its characteristics are rapidly shifting. Where exactly is the urban-rural interface to be found? Just as the urban is “moving into” the rural, elements of the rural are infusing into the urban, and what either means or how it is valued flips and changes. The difference is clearly more than a matter of counting buildings or bodies. Secondly, above and beyond horizontal movements, we need to understand the rural-urban interface less in terms of a defined spatial zone or topographical space and more in terms of the tight topological linkages that exist between seemingly disconnected urban and rural places, as exemplified by climate change and corporate power. Thirdly, the political use and abuse of the categories “rural” and “urban” also demands attention, especially as the rural is increasingly presented as a problematic site of or even shorthand for political conservatism relative to enlightened city folk. Situated between all of these developments, the rural-urban interface and its risks and disasters are far from straightforward or contained to the peri-urban zone.

This session calls for papers that help explore how conceptual and “real” risks of the rural-urban interface are intersecting. It welcomes both empirical and theoretical papers, particularly those that examine past or potential environmental or sociotechnical disasters. It also welcomes geographers from all areas of the discipline, notably urban as well as rural geography, in recognition of the way that a more expansive, sophisticated understanding of the rural-urban interface requires dialogue across our own boundaries.

Rural And Legal Geographies Of Energy And Mining Resources

Theme: Rural and Legal Geography

Lesley Crowe-Delaney, Curtin University

Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) has gained regulatory ground this century as corporate-responsible disasters have resulted in negative impacts on the natural and built environments, human quality of life and fatality. CSR has, however, been criticised for its 'soft law' approach, where the self-regulatory system itself is the major criticism. Importantly and perhaps less researched, is when large corporations withdraw their interests altogether, particularly in energy production and primary industry.

While there are legal standards for these companies, hard laws focus on pollution and environmental impacts. An interdisciplinary approach means that rural and legal geographers can contribute powerfully to these relevant issues.
This session calls for:

case study research, providing inspiration for other geographers
legal perspectives on corporate responsibility beyond extraction or industry viability
rural perspectives on similar issues as a result of corporate withdrawal

Technology And The Likely Transformation Of Rural Space

Theme: Rural Geography

Sonia Graham, UNSW

Emerging and prospective technologies present significant impacts and opportunities for the rural economy, society, environment and polity. These include, but are not limited to: instrumentation for the measurement of farm performance in real time; big data and its analysis; robotics and artificial intelligence; new equipment and machinery (including 3-D and 4-D printers); the driverless trucks ; alternative energy supply and storage; genetic engineering (animals and crops); use of light and sound barriers to replace some on-farm fencing; automated construction techniques; and chemical cuisine.

This session welcomes contributions that analyse the potential impacts that such technologies may have in rural and regional Australia and New Zealand.

The Financialisation Of Housing And Australian Cities

Theme: Urban Geography

Charles Gillon and Nicole Cook, University of Wollongong

This session concerns the financialisation of housing in shaping social, spatial, and political conditions of Australian cities. Viewing housing as a financial asset and investment instrument draws attention to home ownership. Despite a backdrop of unaffordability and strained supply, outright/mortgaged owner-occupation remains Australia’s dominant tenure form. This session interrogates how owner-occupation is sustained, and with what consequences. We welcome papers exploring practices of property-owners and seekers in Australian cities, and or institutional logics and policy frameworks. Suggested themes include:

Affective and emotional dimensions of home ownership
Everyday negotiations of debt and financial risk (including in changing climates)
Owner-occupation and planning influence
Global financial flows, investment properties, empty homes/apartments
Alternatives for housing instruments and housing tenures
Implications for policy cycles (housing supply, negative gearing)

The Limits And Potentials Of Climate Interventions In The City

Theme: Urban Geography

Sophie Webber and Phil McManus, University of Sydney

Cities are sites of intervention for addressing climate change. Yet, as city actors implement adaptation and mitigation programs, the limits and contradictions of urban climate governance are revealed. New conceptual and political frameworks and practices are needed. We invite theoretical and empirical papers that grapple with the intersections of urban climate and social justice, including:

Spaces and sites of urban intervention and their social and climate justice implications
Rescaling of climate initiatives
The limitations and potentials of technocratic governance for responding to climate change
Theories and practices of resilience and resourcefulness addressing climate change
Processes of, and resistance to, green gentrification
Resistance to climate change discourse and action at the city level
New conceptualizations of urban climate governance
Forms of citizenship, collectivity, and democracy enabled through urban climate governance

The Politics Of Caring With

Theme: Cultural Geography (Sponsored by Cultural Geography Study Group)

Kathy Mee and Faith Curtis, University of Newcastle; Miriam Williams, Macquarie University and Emma Power, Western Sydney University

Care is critical to many contemporary debates around social policy and service provision. Following Tronto (1993), care has been conceptualised through the practices of caring about, taking care of, care giving and care receiving. However, little attention has been paid to how individuals and organisations care ‘with’ vulnerable people. Understanding care as something that people do with, rather than for others recognises that people who receive care are not always powerless. ‘Caring with’ decentres the care giver, recognising that care receivers co-create care relations, practices and spaces. ‘Caring with’ relies on communication, dialogue, mutuality and expressions of solidarity. This session invites papers that consider relations and practices of caring with, including materialities of care, economies of care, caring subjectivities, caring ethoses, care relationality and performativity, spaces of care, and care as materialised and practiced in social policy and service provision.

The Politics Of Translation: Knowledge, Language, And Dialogue Across Worlds

Theme: Indigenous Peoples’ Knowledges and Rights

Julian S Yates, Monash University and Andrea J Nightingale, Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences

We propose to explore how language functions as a spatially variable representation of knowledge and existence, and how a politics of translation mediates across worlds. We invite participants to engage with the spatial and temporal dynamics of a politics of translation across knowledge, language, and ontology. How can the embedded meanings carried in languages such as Quechua be translated into Germanic or Roman languages (Nuckolls, 2010)? How might environmental governance approaches articulate a relational more-than-human ethic (such as that of Māori iwi tribes with the Hurunui River) (Thomas, 2015)? How can the historical knowledge of Indigenous ecologies-in-practice inform policy and governance frameworks without being instrumentalised? How is linguistic translation tied to situated knowledges and ontologies? We are interested in contributions that address these or related questions about how governance approaches are affected by a spatially-conditioned politics of translation.

The Re-Emergence Of Health Geography In Australia

Theme: Health Geography

Lukar Thornton, Deakin University and Neil Coffee, University of South Australia

Health geography is re-emerging as an important research focus in Australia. This session invites contributions from those seeking to advance our understanding of place-based influences on health. We are particularly interested in studies that utilise novel methodologies.

Tourism Geographies

Theme: Tourism Geography

Deborah Che, Southern Cross University

Given the inherently spatial aspects of tourism, geographers have developed some of the most important conceptual models for explaining tourism development including resort morphology, the tourist-historic city, and the tourist area life cycle. Additionally geographers have made the most sustained contributions to the study of environmental dimensions of tourism, the sustainability of tourism, and ecotourism. Hall (2013) argues that tourism geography has been a significant contributor to the melding and hybridity of geographic binaries, including the applied vs. theoretical and physical vs. human, and to the development of critical applied geographies of environmental change. In his Progress in Human Geography reports, Gibson emphasizes that tourism geography produces critical, cutting-edge, synthetic and boundary-transgressing work that geographers are urged to pursue.

This session aims to highlight tourism geography at IAG 2017 and welcomes contributions under its broad umbrella.

Troubling Feminism: Contemporary And Future Politics

Theme: Cultural Geography

Robyn Mayes and Barbara Pini, Queensland University of Technology

This session adopts Judith Butler’s provocative terminology inviting papers that explore interconnections between trouble and feminism. For example, feminist gains seem precarious as a result of backlash politics and conservative forces. Feminism, it seems, is in trouble. Nevertheless, feminists continue to question and agitate. They are still causing trouble. Moreover, feminists are troubling in new spaces and in new ways. They are committed to taking the trouble showing care and concern. Sometimes, though, feminism may seem like too much trouble. It requires energy, labour and dedication. It may be inconvenience, disruption and change. Alternatively, it may be feminists themselves who are labelled as ‘trouble’; difficult, bothersome and joyless. In this respect, feminism means trouble for an academic career. We welcome empirical and conceptual papers that critically engage with aspects of contemporary ‘gender trouble/s’ as suggested, but not limited to, the above.

Untaming The Urban: Exploring More-Than-Human Concepts Of Cities, Towns And Suburbs

Theme: Urban Geography

Viveka Turnbull Hocking, Australian National University

This session explores concepts of the more-than-human that have implications for the urban realm. This includes but is not limited to cross-species cohabitation, sharing spaces and resources, novel urban environments and imagining post-anthropocentric futures.

We invite papers that explore emerging concepts, provoke cross disciplinary conversations and consider the following questions:

How can different disciplines work together to reconceptualise a more-than-human approach to urban environments?
What opportunities and risks emerge from the softening of boundaries between the human and non-human realms to foster cohabitation?
What are the implications for urban policy, design and planning, biodiversity and conservation, environmental and human wellbeing for post-anthropocentric futures?

The intention of this session is to bring together research in this emerging field of enquiry for the purpose of developing a publication

Who Counts In The City? Interrogating Urban Power, Presence, And Representation

Theme: Urban Geography

Louise Crabtree, University of Western Sydney and Sarah Gall, Browning Street Studios, Brisbane.

The 21st-century city presents particular challenges for Geography, concerned as it is with policy relevance and disciplinary and methodological diversity. Issues of power, representation, and liveability are converging, and business-as-usual politics is increasingly seen as being under threat. Further, while much has been made of Big Data, recent events such as Brexit and Trump have raised the possibility that personal data has been combined with psychometric methodologies to enable fine-grained manipulation of unconscious voter bias to enable rapid, world-changing political manoeuvres that have rendered ineffectual campaigns based on older demographic methods.

This Urban Geography Study Group session intends to engage with ongoing questions of political legitimacy, civic engagement, social and environmental justice, and conviviality in the context of settler colonialism, big data, ongoing wealth concentration, political extremism, and intensifying surveillance in myriad forms. The session takes particular interest the apparent resurgence of ‘rights to the city’ discourses, recent debates about the de-politicisation of the city, and the more-than-human turn across geography and cognate disciplines. Relevant questions include but are not limited to:

Whose voices are heard in the city, how, and by whom?
How is legitimacy ascribed and what potential is there for ‘radical’ urban geographies in the age of policy impact, corporate and government data usage, and tightening state powers?
How are cities made legible, and how do processes such as data creation and capture, map making, surveillance, and representation intersect with issues of power?

Higher degree candidates and early career researchers will be especially encouraged to submit abstracts. The session will be configured as papers or a panel depending on interest.

Writing Co-Produced Worlds: Perspectives From Early Career Researchers In Critical Development Studies

Theme: Critical Development (Sponsored by Critical Development StudyGroup)

Yasa Belmar, The University of Queensland

Early-career researchers (ECRs) and practitioners who work to understand and improve urban, regional and rural governance face peculiar challenges related to the co-production of knowledge for social transformation. For practitioners, these challenges can relate to the broad constellation of actors, diverse interests, and entrenched power relations which shape governance in these territories. For early career researchers, collaborating to create empowering and emancipatory representations of these worlds can be a daunting task. This postgraduate-led workshop will take the form of a facilitated discussion among participants, who will reflect on the following questions:

What strategies are needed to bridge conflicting rationalities and generate co-produced knowledge and actions in development practice?
What are the enablers and constraints to co-production?
What methodologies can academics and professionals use to allow the co-production of knowledge in theory and practice?
What are the benefits of this type of co-production?

The aim of the session is to catalyse the formation of ongoing cross-institutional writing circles or communities of (research) practice in the area of critical development studies.