Stories at the Center: The Role of Storytelling in the New Radical
Geographical Imagination

I invite paper submissions for the following proposed panel for the
American Studies Association conference in Albuquerque, NM, October 16-19,
2008.

In recent years, urban geographers, planners, and policy makers have begun
to consider the role that storytelling should play in the design of
socially just, sustainable urban environments. This panel heeds the call
of critical urban geographers, such as Robert Beauregard, Katherine
McKittrick, Ruth Gilmore Wilson, and Clyde Woods, who urge us to seek out
the way in which the stories of those most marginalized by global economic
structures demand from us a new, interdisciplinary understanding of space
and place. It also seeks to address questions about the importance of
storytelling to the formation of a new radical geographical imagination
capable of resisting and thinking beyond the spatial dictates of Neoliberal
global capitalism.

Some questions this panel might consider are as follows: How might stories
and storytelling be useful in our work to make sense of dominant geographic
structures of knowledge and break open our understanding of what urban
space can be and do? How does the practice of telling, listening to, and
writing stories about where we live “change the problem space” (Scott) for
residents, planners, policy makers, and urban intellectuals thinking about
the problem of achieving a socially just city? Historically, how have
marginalized counter stories about the “cities of fact and feeling”
(Rotella) worked to push up against or require change in the ways in which
powerful urban actors (politicians, planners, intellectuals/academics)
build and imagine cities? How do Black geographies and Black geographical
stories in particular express, portray, or come to terms with the city
spaces in a way that is not accomplished by dominant geographies as they
are dictated by canonical social science, architectural, and planning texts
(McKittrick and Woods)? Finally, and most importantly, how does the
process of telling and writing stories forge paths for readers and writers,
audiences and artists, between revolutionary theory and revolutionary praxis?

Please submit 250-300 word abstracts and a brief CV to michnac_at_bc.edu by
January 8, 2008 if you are interested in participating.

Catherine Michna
English Department
Boston College
michnac_at_bc.edu

===================================
 From the Literary Calls for Papers Mailing List
            cfp_at_english.upenn.edu
             more information at
         http://cfp.english.upenn.edu
===================================
Received on Fri Dec 14 2007 - 10:42:02 EST