**2nd Call for Papers for Nordic Geographers Meeting June 18th–21st 2017 in Stockholm, Sweden**
 
Postcapitalist Futurologies
 
Conveners: Aron Sandell (University of Oslo, Norway) & Tuomo Alhojärvi (University of Oulu, Finland) 
 
The eight years that have passed since the meltdown of financial capitalism have been characterized not only by the proliferation of austerity measures but also by the popularization of postcapitalist imaginaries. Ideas around an approaching end of capitalism circulate widely today and have been propagated in particular through a genre of writing that we might call postcapitalist futurology. Some of the main contributions to this genre, including Mason’s Postcapitalism (2015), Srnicek & Williams’s Inventing the Future (2015) and Hardt & Negri’s Commonwealth (2009), all propose similar narratives of capitalist crisis and postcapitalist potentiality based on the tendential developments of machinic automation and digital networks of socialized information. The path to postcapitalism, the story goes, runs through and beyond the most advanced landscapes of techno-capitalist development.
 
In this workshop, we wish to delve into such contemporary postcapitalist futurologies and the spatio-temporalities they inhabit and perform. We want to question the affirmation of capitalist logics of techno-social change -- and, indeed, the totalized presence of “the capitalist system” in the first place -- as a prerequisite for envisioning capitalism’s eventual demise. How might we think postcapitalism otherwise and elsewhere? Following authors such as Gibson-Graham (2006a, 2006b) and Harney & Moten (2013), we call for a decidedly open study of postcapitalism, welcoming a broad range of contributions that include interrogations of past and current theorizations of postcapitalism(s); discussions of existing and proposed postcapitalist practices; as well as artistic, performative, and fictional engagements with postcapitalisms we already have, and postcapitalisms yet to come. The workshop format will be based around short interventions (e.g. paper presentations, collaborative exercises, artistic performances) followed by ample time for collective thinking and discussion. 
 
Please submit abstracts of no more than 250 words to Aron Sandell (aron.sandell@sosgeo.uio.no) and Tuomo Alhojärvi (tuomo.alhojarvi@oulu.fi) by 15 December 2016. Also, feel free to ask any questions about the proposed session. For more information about the conference, please check the website: http://www.humangeo.su.se/english/ngm-2017
 
Gibson-Graham, J.K. 2006a. The End of Capitalism (As We Knew It). A Feminist Critique of Political Economy. University of Minnesota Press.
Gibson-Graham, J.K. 2006b. A Postcapitalist Politics. University of Minnesota Press.
Hardt, Michael & Antonio Negri. 2009. Commonwealth. Harvard University Press.
Harney, Stefano & Fred Moten. 2013. The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study. Autonomedia.
Mason, Paul. 2013. Postcapitalism: A Guide to Our Future. Allen Lane.
Srnicek, Nick & Alex Williams. 2015. Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World Without Work. Verso.

Call For Papers
Royal Geographical Association Annual Conference, London: 29 August – 1 September 2017
 
The Future of the Bunker // The Bunker of the Future
 
“Anachronistic in normal periods, in peacetime the bunker appears as a survival machine, as a shipwrecked submarine on a beach.” (Virilio, 1994)
The last two decades have seen increasing public interest in, and engagements with, the abandoned remains of Second World War and Cold War era military and civil defence bunkers. Academics have been busy analysing the motives and forms of this engagement (Bennett 2011; Maus 2017) and also charting the origins and affective-material impacts of those 20th century waves of bunker-building mania (Bartolini 2015; Klinke 2015; Ziauddin 2016). Such engagements and studies have tended to figure the bunker as a now-deactivated form – as a form of contemporary ruin – and as a phenomenon of the (albeit recent) past. This Call for Papers seeks to supplement this scholarship by examining the bunkers’ futurity: through considering the bunker as an immanent contemporary and still-yet-to-come form of place. As John Armitage (2015) has recently put it (writing of Paul Virilio’s seminal first-encounter with a bunker of the Nazi Atlantic Wall in 1958): “when we face the bunker, we need to periodize our feelings of lurking danger – to insert them into historical time and to identify the periods of relative serenity, when not only the fixed content of the military bunker but also the relation between oblique architecture and the sudden appearance of this object on the beach remain relatively tranquil”.
This call invites proposals for 15 mins presentations originating in any discipline, that speak to this concern to examine the bunker’s futurity. This call is not intended to be prescriptive, as consideration of the bunker’s (benign or malevolent) potentialities requires a degree of speculation and cross-disciplinary thinking. The following list of potential themes is therefore indicative, rather than restrictive:
 

• How are the 20th century’s redundant bunkers repurposed, and is this re-appropriation always playful or “funky” (Strömberg 2013). What does the variety of re-uses tell us about the multivalent resilience (or obstinacy) of the bunker-form?
• How, specifically, has the bunker-form influenced the ‘new military urbanism’ observed by Stephen Graham (2011) at heart of contemporary urban infrastructures and the bunkerisation of otherwise conventional buildings (Monteyne 2014)?
• How is the bunker-form evolving in its contemporary suburban manifestations as drone command centres, government crisis command rooms and fortified emergency stores?
• How might the "perpetual architecture" (CLUI 2013) of seed banks, nuclear waste and fissile material repositories and server farms be seen as the bunker’s latest iteration? And following Van Wyck 2004, how can we analyse the time-capsule role of such bunker-forms?
• How can the present and future of the bunker be publicly presenced? Do the techniques of bunker-hunting applied to the recreational surveying of the last century’s now-abandoned bunkers work for their extant, and forthcoming 21st century variants?
• How is the image of the bunker evolving in popular culture?
• Is the intimate association between concrete and bunkers breaking down, and if it is what are the implications of this material change to the bunker-form? Is a bunker defined by it’s poured-concrete construction or by the exceptional, power-concentrated and emergency-driven reasons for its existence?
• Given the rise of commercial panic room and bunker-builders like http://www.terravivos.com/ has the bunker become privatised, and prospects of survival commodified? What are the emergent inequalities of protection against 21st century existential threats?
• What and where are the bunkers of future? Space bases, underground or undersea living-stations, cryogenic capsules?


 

Please send abstracts (maximum of 250 words) to Luke Bennett (l.e.bennett@shu.ac.uk) (Reader in Space, Place & Law, Department of the Natural & Built Environment, Sheffield Hallam University, UK) by 1st February 2017.
 
References
Armitage, John. 2015. Virilio for Architects. Abingdon: Routledge.
Bartolini, Nadia. 2015. ‘The Politics of Vibrant Matter: Consistency, Containment and the Concrete of Mussolini’s Bunker’ Journal of Material Culture 20(2): 191-210.
Bennett, Luke. 2011. ‘Bunkerology: A Case Study in the Theory and Practice of Urban Exploration’ Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 29: 421-434.
CLUI (Center for Land Use Interpretation). 2013. ‘Perpetual Architecture: Uranium Disposal Cells of America.’ Lay of the Land Newsletter, Winter 2013 (online) http://www.clui.org/newsletter/winter-2013/perpetual-architecture
Graham, Stephen. 2011. Cities Under Siege: The New Military Urbanism. London: Verso.
Klinke, Ian. 2015. ‘The Bunker and the Camp: Inside West Germany’s Nuclear Tomb’ Environment & Planning D: Society & Space 33(1): 154-168.
Monteyne, David. 2014. ‘Uncertainties: Architecture and Building Security in the 21st Century’ in Benjamin Flowers (ed.) Architecture in an Age of Uncertainty. Abingdon: Routledge.
Maus, Gunnar. 2017. ‘Popular Historical Geographies of the Cold War: Playing, Hunting and Recording Small Munitions Bunkers in Germany’ in Luke Bennett (ed.) In the Ruins of the Cold War Bunker: Materiality, Affect and Meaning Making. London: Rowman & Littlefield International.
Strömberg, Per. 2013. ‘Funky Bunkers: The Post-Military Landscape as a Readymade Space and a Cultural Playground’ in Gary A. Boyd & Denis Linehan, Ordnance: War + Architecture & Space. Farnham: Ashgate, pp. 67-81.
Van Wyck, Peter. 2004. ‘American Monument: The Waste Isolation Pilot Plant’, in Scott C. Zeman & Michael A, Amundson (eds.), Atomic Culture: How We Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb. Boulder: University Press of Colorado, pp. 149-172.
Virilio, Paul. 1994. Bunker Archeology. New York: Princeton Architectural Press (translated by George Collins).
Ziauddin, Sylvia Berger. 2016. ‘(De)territorializing the Home. The Nuclear Bomb Shelter as a Malleable Site of Passage’. Environment & Planning D: Society & Space, advanced publication online 12 November, DOI 10.1177/0263775816677551
 
 

Call for Papers: CIDADES, Comunidades e Territórios - Special Dossier: Art Time City on the temporality of urban interventions.
Deadline | 31 December 2016
 
Dossier Editors: Pedro Costa and Andrea Pavoni
Expected word count | up to 9000 words, notes and references included
 
CIDADES, Comunidades e Territórios is an open access academic journal disseminating research and discussions in the scientific area of Urban Studies. CIDADES is multilingual and welcome contributions in Portuguese, English, French and Spanish. Any submission of articles is made directly through the website platform [link broken] and is subjected to double-bind peer reviewing process.
 
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