[URBANTH-L]CFP: THE SPACES AND ARTICULATIONS OF ECONOMIC PRACTICES

[Angela Jancius]

Apologies for cross-posting.


AAG2006 CALL FOR PAPERS

THE SPACES AND ARTICULATIONS OF ECONOMIC PRACTICES

Chicago, 7th-11th March 2006
http://www.aag.org/annualmeetings/Chicago2006/call_4_papers.cfm

Adrian Smith, Department of Geography, Queen Mary, University of London,
UK, a.m.smith at qmul.ac.uk

Alison Stenning, Centre for Urban and Regional Development Studies,
School of Geography, Politics and Sociology, University of Newcastle,
UK, alison.stenning at ncl.ac.uk 

Research on the diversity of economic forms and practices has been
gathering pace within geography in recent years, forming the focus of
numerous workshops and conference sessions.  The wealth of research
ongoing in the area has drawn our attention (back) to household and
community economies, the informal sphere, alternative financial
institutions (banks, credit unions etc.), social enterprises and fair
trade, amongst many others.  Each of these activities brings together a
range of different spaces (the home, the community, the market, the
global, the workplace, the high street, the urban and the rural and so
on) yet, even among geographers, the spatiality of economic practices is
often taken for granted through concepts such as networks, embeddedness
and flows. In connecting different spaces, economic practices create
articulations between different spheres (formal/informal,
market/non-market, capitalist/non-capitalist), breaking down the
categories and dichotomies we establish to form complex economic
geographies. Addressing the geographies of economic practices also
allows us to begin to explore the differentiated relations of power
within economic practices, to interrogate questions of differential
access to assets and resources, and to connect these geographies to a
wider socio-economic landscape which shapes patterns of wealth and
poverty, inclusion and exclusion.

In this session we seek to interrogate explicitly the spaces and
articulations of economic practices. We envisage the papers as building
upon interests in diverse and alternative economies and on the recent
'practice turn'. Indeed, a focus on practices enables us to examine the
sites of economic life that are constituted by different, and at times
divergent, forces, while at the same time enabling a consideration of
the linked, relational and articulated nature of economic life.

We invite papers which address some of the following themes:
~       how can we conceptualise spaces of economic practice?
~       how do the geographies of economic practices shape the form and
function of the practices?
~       how do diverse economic practices produce and reproduce spaces?
~       how do diverse economic practices work across spaces to
articulate different spheres and categories of economic activity?
~       how do the geographies of economic practices shape access to
assets and resources for material and social reproduction?

Please send abstracts (of not more than 250 words) for possible
inclusion in this session in the format required by the AAG to either of
the organizers by 23rd September 2005.

Abstract instructions:
http://www.aag.org/annualmeetings/Chicago2006/abstract.cfm