TECHNONATURES - Call for Papers

TECHNONATURES IV

2006 Meeting of The American Association of Geographers, March 7-11 2006, Chicago, IL
http://www.aag.org/annualmeetings/index.cfm

Call for Papers:

In an era marked by accelerating environmental change,deepening battles over co-technological and bio/nano/medico technological transformations, the nature
of 'Nature' and the politics of the environment appears increasingly to be up for grabs.

Ongoing debates concerning productions of nature, contested natures, or socio-natures continue to draw attention to the irreducibly cultural and political qualities of contemporary socio-environmental relations and processes.

Elsewhere, Haraway's cyborgs and 'companion species', or Latour's emphasis on 'quasi subjects/objects' and 'actants' continue to stress that hybridity and the complex spaces of the inbetween is the place of (a)modern politics.

In these proposed sessions we would like to reflect on the extent to which technonatural, hybrid and cyborg discursive practices continue to be constructive and
productive means to disrupt and rework environmental politics and debate.

We would like to draw colleagues together whose work is attempting to develop critical geographies and sociologies of changing environment-technology-society relations.

Topics of interest might include (but are not limited to):
* Technonatural landscapes and environmental histories;
* Urban/suburban technonatures;
* Technonatural Discourses and the Politics of 'Race', Ethnicity, Sexuality, Gender
* Techonatural human / nonhuman bodies;
* The politics and pathologies of technonatural time/spaces;
* Limits and limitations of technonatural and cyborg discourses.

Expressions of interest and abstracts By: 3 October
should be sent to:

Erik Swyngedouw, Geography and the Environment, Oxford
University Erik.swyngedouw@geog.ox.ac.uk or

Damian White, Dept of Sociology and Anthropology, James
Madison University whitedf@jmu.edu