Conference of Irish Geographers, University College Cork. 
Thursday 4 May - Saturday 6 May 2017. 
 
Call for Papers (Deadline 20th March 2017). Early bird registration closes 20th March. 
 
Organisers: Temporality in the City.  [email protected]
 
Session abstract
 
Space and time are key concepts in Geography but often space is prioritised over time. Temporality within the urban is often focused on understanding temporary uses of vacant spaces and this has been an increasing narrative in the literature in recent years. These types of temporary uses are often critiqued as fitting neatly into neoliberal city agendas (O’ Callaghan and Lawton, 201). The often temporariness of these sites can lessen their impact on urban discourse, thus, in this session we want to illustrate alternative narratives of temporariness.  We wish to explore temporality more broadly to include not only temporary spaces, but also events in the city which are temporary, such as emergencies or politics. Exploring issues such as, in what ways do these narratives merge, diverge, illuminate one another, and create one another? What can be learned from expanding the concepts of temporary use to other examples in the city? Examples could include the temporariness of emergencies, elected officials, governance and acts of governmentality, public response, protest, technology, governance and work amongst others. Simply, this session is interested in exploring the idea of urban temporariness, which is seen as a distinct form of modernity (Benko, 1997), beyond just its effects on spaces but on how they are connected and constantly re-create, sustain and dismantle each other.
 
Thus, this session is not prescriptive and welcomes academics and postgraduate students interested in urban temporality and its effect on different urban systems, infrastructures, phenomenon’s and issues.   We particularly welcome case studies that add to the limited empirical work in the area of urban temporality in the context of permanent systems with a temporary element such as emergencies and elected officials.
 
Areas of potential interest for research papers may include, but are not limited to:

• A temporary space evolving out of temporary politics or  a semi- permanent emergency;
• How ‘temporary’ emergencies become embedded in permanent policy;
• How temporary but sustained protest can change cities, policy and even countries;
• What can temporality as a concept tell us about the city?
• How ever-evolving technology creates a temporariness in its use and yet, it is being invested in highly within cities.
• The idea of modernity and the city.
• Vacancy, homelessness and emergency.
• Governmentality in a temporary city. 

 
Instructions for authors
Please submit your abstract through the CIG paper abstract form and select 'Temporality in the City' as the themed session and forward your abstract and interest to session convenors.  Form can be found here: http://www.conferenceofirishgeographers.ie/abstract-submission-form-c1r5x
Please note: You cannot submit an abstract until you have registered for the conference which we urge you to do asap. 
The expected format is 15 minutes with 5 minutes for Q&A but is subject to change. 

RGS-IBG Annual Conference, London, 29th August – 1st September 2017
 
Resource Temporalities: Anticipations, Retentions and Afterlives
Session Convenors: Dr Kärg Kama (Oxford, Geography) & Dr Gisa Weszkalnys (LSE, Anthropology)
Deadline: 5th February 2017
 
Recent work in resource geography and anthropology has demonstrated the need to move beyond issues of resource control and distribution toward a critical examination of how resources are made (Bridge 2013, Kama 2013, Li 2014, Richardson and Weszkalnys 2014). A focus on resource-making draws attention to the distributed quality of resources as always in-becoming, rather than biophysically or geophysically given, substances. It also reveals their indeterminate and often speculative nature as the outcome of a variety of techno-scientific, governmental, entrepreneurial, and financial practices (e.g. Majury 2014, Valdivia 2015, Weszkalnys 2015, Zalik 2015). Inherent to this process of resource-making are important temporal aspects, which have remained remarkably underexplored. In this session, we take the existing literature as a springboard to ask new questions about the multiple temporalities generated by processes of resource-making ranging from anticipations of resource matters, to their diverse retentions, to other temporal and material states once processed or unmade as a resource.
Resource-making rarely follows a linear trajectory. Its projected successes are often no more than a grasping for self-fulfilling prophecies, and its achievements are partly bound to the legacies of past and present resource production through types of path-dependency and lock-ins. Current examples of resource-making projects highlight their incremental yet spatio-temporally contingent nature, including the mortgaging of hydrocarbon futures by emerging producer states, a practice recently called into question by falling oil prices; the constitution of “reclaimed” landscapes in the context of mine decommissioning and closure; the production of overinflated resource estimates in the quest for “unconventional” fossil fuels and novel extractive spaces (e.g. ocean seabeds); as well as the specific modes of financialisation now encountered at resource frontiers, which produce various absences and presences across the domains of science and market. Important questions are also raised by the parallel life of extractive waste products and by projects of resource-making that have been blocked or indefinitely postponed due to scientific, political, or economic factors.
We invite papers that explore the diverse engagements with time that underpin these and other resource-making endeavours, drawing on a range of methods and trans-disciplinary analytical approaches. Contributions may address (but are not limited to) the following themes:

• Anticipatory politics: collective imaginations, expectations and projections that portend specific resource scenarios, and their relation to foresight, prophecy and divination
• Epistemic reconfigurations: Knowledge controversies that shape forms of epistemic authority and expertise around resource-based ventures, and the relationships between different sources of anticipatory knowledge (e.g. technocratic, corporate and community-based).
• Resource affects: the affective, experiential and embodied encounters with resources that project and attribute capacities to resources, beyond the “here and now” of resource extraction, into the past and the future
• Transubstantiation: Resource potentiality and the transformative effects of calculation, mapping, selective mining, refinement, and other forms of conceptual or geo-chemical processing. How has the increasing financialisation of resource production reinforced notions of purely speculative gain and the de-coupling of material and economic resource natures?
• Resources of the future: temporal and material practices that contribute to the conjuring of “novel” resources and extractive spaces, such as unconventional fossil fuels, geothermal energy, deep-ocean polymetallic nodules, atmospheric commons, but also the medical reconfiguration of human bodily substances as resource in the context of clinical trials
• Parallel lives: what happens to extractive waste and other unintended byproducts as they take on a life of their own in the shadow economies surrounding resource exploitation?
• Afterlives: how are resources unmade when extractive projects fail, are decommissioned, or closed? How do experiences with past “resources of the future” echo and reverberate in current resource-making efforts?
• Methodological innovation: ethnographic, participatory, activist, experimental and response-able forms of research.

Please send your abstract (150 words) to both Kärg Kama ([email protected]) and Gisa Weszkalnys ([email protected]) along with your full contact details. The deadline for abstract submission is 5 February 2017.
For more information on the conference, please see the following link: http://www.rgs.org/WhatsOn/ConferencesAndSeminars/Annual+International+Conference/Annual+international+conference.htm