Commission on Political Geography

International Geographical Union

Pre-Conference 2024

22 to 24 August

Queen’s University Belfast

 

Queen’s University Belfast will be hosting the International Geographical Union (IGU) Political Geography Pre-Conference from 22 to 24 August 2024, ahead of the 35^thInternational Geographical Congress 2024, taking place 24-30 August in Dublin.

Institute Fellows Dr Merav Amir (Legacy) and Dr Tristan Sturm (Religion, Arts and Peacebuilding) are members of the organising committee for the Pre-Conference.

The Call for Contributions is now open.

Difference is geography; geography is difference. Political geography recognizes that perceptions of similarities and differences define and determine social and political settings. To understand the political building blocks and forces which shape our world, difference, be it perceived or real, must be accounted for.  We further recognise that our scholarship is also situated within different linguistic and cultural spheres.  Difference has not always been celebrated, and indeed is often given as an explanation for geopolitical conflict, tension, and violence.  In Belfast, a city which has been shaped by political and socio-religious divisions and which recently marked 25 years since the Good Friday Peace Agreement, the pre-conference gathering will celebrate diversity, embrace it, and explore its implications for political geography both historically and in our political present.

Against the backdrop of social and political changes, and the emergence of new forms of nationalism and populism, we invite scholars and practitioners to submit abstracts that reflect on issues related to the diversity of political difference across scales.  Papers are welcome on themes or topics including, but not limited to:

• Political and cultural boundaries and their effects on political processes
• The politics of identity and difference
• Geographies of peace and peace-making
• Geopolitics of migration and mobility
• Political ecology and more-than-human geographies
• Gender, sexuality and the politics of representation
• Decolonizing methods, theories, and practices
• The role of scholar-activism in political geography

The deadline for submissions is 1 March 2024.

For more information and to submit a paper or session proposal, visit the IGU-CPG website.

The Commission on Political Geography, or CPG, is one of the 43 thematic commissions of the International Geographical Union (IGU).  It conceives Political Geography in a broad way both as a subdiscipline of human geography and as an interdisciplinary field. It therefore collaborates closely with several other IGU Commissions, including history of geography, geographical education, gender and geography, global understanding, governance, toponymy, urban geography, and regional commissions (African studies, Latin American studies, Mediterranean Basin).