Dismantling diasporas: rethinking the geographies of diasporic identity, mobility and development
Calls for Papers – RGS-IBG 2012 paper sessions
Dismantling diasporas: rethinking the geographies of diasporic identity, mobility and development
Session convenors: Elizabeth Mavroudi, Loughborough University; and Anastasia Christou, University of Sussex
This session wishes to re-energise debates on the conceptualisation of diasporas in geographical scholarship and beyond. In particular, there is a need to engage with the potential tension between ‘roots and routes’ that those in diaspora often face and geographers are in an excellent position to further such debates. This session aims to open up discussion on the complex ways in which diasporas create and maintain connections and spaces with each other and their homelands, how they construct and imagine place, and the repercussions in terms of homeland involvement and development. Perhaps more importantly, it stresses the need to consider diasporas as dynamic and evolving, rather than as static entities or categories. In this way we can pay attention to the power relations, inclusions and exclusions that take place within and beyond diasporas. We therefore want to shed more light on the conceptual use of diaspora but also on the changing geopolitical/social/economic/cultural role diasporas play in contemporary home/host societies through empirical case studies.
Themes we would like to focus on include, but are not limited to, the following:
- Constructing diasporas: ambivalence, in-between-ness, actively creating, invoking and using identities, homes, belonging, nationalism, national identity and place
- Affecting diasporas: embodied diasporas, emotionalities, defying representation and categorization
- Dividing diasporas: power relations, tensions, disunities, fragmentation, inclusions, exclusions within and between diasporas
- Extreme diasporas: how and why diasporas may become involved in extreme, strategic activities, such as terrorism, extreme and exclusive notions of nationalism, geopolitics and geographies of security involving diasporas
- Bridging diasporas: symbolic, material, virtual socio-cultural, economic and political connections and spaces within, between and beyond diasporas
- Returning diasporas: physical/virtual return, circular migration, brain circulation, brain exchange, transnational/translocal homecoming visits
- Empowering diasporas: agency, impacts on homeland/host country socio-cultural, economic and political development and security, conflict resolution, self-determination, liberation movements.
Please send abstracts of no more than 250 words to Liz Mavroudi (E.Mavroudi@lboro.ac.uk) and Anastasia Christou (A.Christou@sussex.ac.uk) by 20th January 2012.