CFP: Domesticating Geopolitics

Second Call for Papers:
Domesticating geopolitics

RGS-IBG Annual International Conference, Exeter, UK, 2-4 September 2015

Convened by Dr. Tara Woodyer, Dr. Diana Martin (University of Portsmouth); Dr. Sean Carter, Dr. Philip Kirby (University of Exeter)

Co-sponsored by the Political Geography Research Group and the Social and Cultural Geography Research Group

From the outset, critical geopolitics has emphasised approaches that question spatial distinctions between foreign/domestic politics and political distinctions between formal/popular geopolitics. More recently, feminist contributions to critical geopolitical debates have re-articulated the necessity of including the ‘everyday’ and the ‘ordinary’ into our accounts of the geopolitical, in part to work towards the dissolution of clear-cut distinctions between public and private, and towards the increasing realisation that different scales are not separate but intertwined.

This session then will focus both on what Pain & Staeheli (2014) describe as ‘the intimate outwards’ as well as  ‘the geopolitical inwards’. We therefore take ‘domesticating geopolitics’ to capture a broad range of practices, objects, performativities and discourses that contribute to how geopolitics is rendered familiar and sanitised, and the ways in which the home and bodies become a terrain of the geopolitical. Bodies, personal decisions, religious beliefs and feelings thus become sites for reproduction and contestation of geopolitical imaginaries and possibilities. They ‘areterritory but also make territory’ as intimacy becomes a ‘site of geopolitical practices’ (Smith 2012, 2009).  This session seeks then to explore the potential of notions of domesticating and the intimate for expanding our understanding of the geopolitical.

We invite conceptual and empirical papers that may address (but are not exclusive to):

  • The role of objects and technologies in the translation of geopolitics between domestic and other spaces
  • Visibility and invisibility of intimate geopolitics
  • Material geopolitical cultures and ‘the domestic’
  • Geopolitical boundaries in/of the home
  • The intimate as resistance
  • Non-violent and intimate geopolitics of peace

Proposals for papers, including title, name, contact details and an abstract of no more than 250 words, should be emailed to Diana Martin (diana.martin@port.ac.uk) by Wednesday 11th February 2015.

References

Pain, R. & Staeheli, L. (2014) Introduction: intimacy-geopolitics and violence. Area, 46 (4): 344-347.

Smith, S. (2012) Intimate geopolitics: religion, marriage, and reproductive bodies in Leh, Ladakh, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 102(6): 1511-1528.

Smith, S. (2009) The domestication of geopolitics: Buddhist-Muslim conflict and the policing of marriage and the body in Ladakh, India, Geopolitics, 14 (2): 197-218.