CFP Geographies of inequality, time and hardship: yesterday, today, tomorrow

Call for Papers: Nordic Geographers Meeting (NGM2017) (Stockholm, Sweden: June 18th - 21st 2017)

Session title: Geographies of inequality, time and hardship: yesterday, today, tomorrow

Convenors: Helen Holmes and Sarah Marie Hall (University of Manchester, UK)

About the session
This session will explore the geographies and temporalities of inequality and hardship.  Contemporary studies of inequality, particularly around the geographies of austerity and hardship, are very much focused on the urgency of ‘today’s’ issues.  Food and fuel poverty, the impact of economic crises, rates of joblessness and precarious employment, housing and city living, to name but a few, are discussed through rhetoric concerned with the here and now; a prevailing politics of the present. Coupled with the dominant discourse of austerity, and its associated political ideology of frugality and restraint, the geographies of inequality are positioned within a particular time and space.  

This session aims to open up these debates, engaging with a broader temporal and spatial perspective.  In doing so, we firstly wish to focus on the notion of 'hardship', a term that we find usefully encapsulates a wide array of personally and socially affective experiences, including and beyond the economic. Secondly, we propose a broader temporality to exploring this field.  Thinking through the fluid categories of past, present and future we want this session to capture the breadth of temporalities and how they function within the geographies of inequality. These could be memories and stories of a time gone by, or imagined temporalities of the future.  Likewise they may reveal the rhythms, frequencies and tempos of the geographies of hardship, time speeding up or slowing down, or they may capture the bundling of space-time – work, leisure, gender.

We invite papers/contributions that engage with the temporalities and geographies of hardship through a focus on, though not limited to:

- Work (paid, unpaid, divisions of labour)
- Gender relations
- Materiality/material culture
- Methods for researching temporal geographies 
- Social practices
- Social, political or economic exclusion
- Alternative and diverse economies
- The life course
- Caringscapes


Please submit abstracts (no longer than 300 words) by December 10th 2016 to:
Helen Holmes ([email protected]) and Sarah Marie Hall ([email protected])