* With apologies for cross-posting *
Call for Papers: 32nd International Geographical Congress (IGC) 2012,
Cologne, August 26th-30th 2012 (deadline 15 December 2011)
Financialisation, marketisation and the environment: Towards
?alternative? economic geographies of finance?
Session Organisers: Tim Heinemann (HCU Hamburg), Jane Pollard
(Newcastle University) and Hans-Martin Zademach (KU
Eichstätt-Ingolstadt)
The global financial crisis sparked a renewed interest of geographers
and other social scientist into the nature and the socio-spatial
relationships of financial systems. So far, the growing body of
literature on finance and financialisation has however paid only
little attention to environmental and social concerns. But practices
of financialisation and marketisation create serious consequences for
the natural and social environment: The markets for CO2-emissions and
derivatives for natural resources or the privatisation of water, waste
and sewage management in municipalities are striking examples.
Likewise, the provision of health and other social services is
increasingly run by private / publically listed corporations, which
are subject to external scrutiny through financial analysts, investors
and traders. That is, the provision of environmental goods and social
services has become narrowly tied to the forces of financial markets,
their logics and marketised modes of governance. Against the backdrop
of the financial crisis, these new modes of governance have been
brought in question ? a questioning, that has both an empirical
component (how do these modes of governance work in varying political
economic contexts, [how] can they be reformed?) and a normative one
(are there alternatives?) and is thus offering fruitful avenues for
context- and scale-sensitive geographical work. By means of following
these avenues, the session aims to advance the discussions about
?alternatives? to concurrent capitalist relations and mainstream
practices of finance.
Possible topics for papers might include, but are not limited to:
- Financialisation / marketisation and the environment
- Financialisation / marketisation and daily life
- Financialisation and social exclusion
- Responses to financialisation
- Business ethics in the financial industry
- Moral geographies and social banking
- Ethical / sustainable investments funds
- Geographies of ?alternative? economic and financial practices
(Islamic banking,micro / sustainable / social finance, LETS etc.)
- Links between capitalist and alternative spaces of finance
Anyone interested in presenting a paper in this session is invited to
submit an abstract of up to 250 words to Tim Heinemann
(tim.heinem...@hcu-hamburg.de), Jane Pollard (jane.poll...@ncl.ac.uk)
and Hans-Martin Zademach (zadem...@ku-eichstaett.de) and/or the online
registration form at www.igc2012.org by 15th December 2011.
With best regards,
Tim Heinemann, Jane Pollard and Hans-Martin Zademach
