I am seeking paper submissions for the following proposed panel for the
American Studies Association conference in Albuquerque, NM, October 16-19,
2008 (see theasa.net for conference info).

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 geographers, such as Robert Beauregard, Ruth Wilson Gilmore,
Katherine McKittrick, 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: 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? 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)? 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? 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 no
later than January 8 if you are interested in participating.

Catherine Michna
English Department
Boston College

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Received on Fri Dec 14 2007 - 13:26:30 EST