Wednesday 4 June 2014

New paper: 'The geographies of the conference'

Protesting the 2011 Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting
Ruth Craggs and I have a new paper out in Geography Compass which reviews existing work on the political and cultural geographies of conferences in politics and science.

The collaboration emerged from the discovery of a shared interest in conferences as sites of knowledge production and political action, where the micro-geographies of social interaction collide with broader geopolitical or cultural forces in the pursuit of agreement, consensus or dissent. Conferences play an important part in the rhythms of both science and politics, and we thought it would be interesting to put these spheres next to each other in order to tease out some commonalities. Of course, conferences often do this work of conjunction themselves, with conferences on issues like climate change frequently bringing together individuals from the very different social worlds of science and politics into the same room, with fascinating consequences.