Show me how to do like you
Show me how to do it.
Stevie Wonder, ‘Do Like You’ (1980)
A recondite collective once set out to abolish outer space by drafting a manifesto. They said ordinary humans have been lied to ceaselessly and without mercy. Calling themselves the Committee to Abolish Outer Space (CAOS), their manifesto lists down guidelines based on an organizing principle/program. In a language, simultaneously serious and playful, they point out that our social and biological lives are eroded by capitalism, and outer space is like capital, what Marx called as “dripping from head to toe, from every pore, with blood and dirt.” Much like the process of primitive accumulation that created “technologies of power acquired through colonial conquest”, outer space represents the world’s ills and the vicious practices of humans and institutions of power.
Practice orbits our social lives. From ideas emanating from novels, online shows, ideologies, and ecologies, to engaging in theories and site ontologies, they influence the type of practice we engage in. The late Fredric Jameson (1934-2024) once argued that one of the practices of postmodernism resulted in pastiche. From practice to pastiche – the river is indeed wide. Practice, then, can come from various situations, provocations and predicaments, turns and shifts. In academia, practice gained re-appraisals in the dawning light of the representational turn. Everts, Lahr-Kurten and Watson contend that human geography has been enriched in its acknowledgment of the vitality of practice as a companion to theory. It invites the blossoming of new knowledge inquiries. In Dominique Amorsolo’s study of the Lower Abra River using historical GIS, ‘new folklife geonarratives’ showed that human practices assist in the river’s ‘natural’ trajectory. So that’s where we are now, and this is when you come in.
Just like our earlier ICGS call for abstracts, practice can be one (or several) from a pluriverse of theory and praxis. So, send us your abstract that attends to the storying of particular and specific geographical practices. They can include but certainly not limited to creative pedagogies, post-human landscapes, surveillance and sousveillance, food and agroecology, resistance and refusals, playful mapping and ludic geographies, religious lifeworlds, remote and emote sensing, historical cartographies, queering spaces, re-wilding practices, carescapes and ‘care’-ful geographies, and various other doings and mappings. And oh yes, even transgressive performativities that Stevie Wonder wrote and sang about in his song ‘Do Like You’.
Send us your abstract by 20 October 2024 through this link: https://bit.ly/ICGS2024Abstracts.
To see our original call for abstracts, click this link to read specific details of the call or simply paste this link to your URL https://updgeography.blogspot.com/2024/09/icgs-2024-situated-in-practice.html
References:
Amorsolo, DS (2022). Folklife as Geonarrative: The Fluvial Lifeworld Confluences of the Lower Abra River-Delta and the Town of Santa, The Pennsylvania Geographer, 60(1), 28-53.
Everts, J, Lahr-Kurten, M and M Watson (2011). Practice matters!, Erdkunde, 65(4), 323-334.
Jameson, F (1993/1997). Postmodernism and consumer society. In Studying Culture: An Introductory Reader, edited by Ann Gray, and Jim McGuigan, 206–217. New York: Oxford University Press.
Kriss, S (2015). Manifesto of the Committee to Abolish Outer Space. Pamphlet. Print.
Marx, K (1867/1976). Chapter 39: Genesis of the Industrial Capitalist, Capital, Volume One, London: Penguin Books.
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