CFP: RGS-IBG Annual International Conference 2018 – Global Challenges and Assemblages

Global Challenges and Assemblages

Session conveners:

Anthonia Ijeoma Onyeahialam, Francesca Fois, Michael Woods (Aberystwyth University, UK)

 RGS-IBG Annual International Conference 2018, Cardiff University, Wales. Tuesday 28 to Friday 31 August.

Global challenges are understood as major issues that our planet is facing that confront the global community (Sandler 1997). They converge around issues of food security, water supply and management, energy resources, climate change, population growth, increasing migration, crime and diseases. These issues transcend national borders, creating networks, connection and engagements at multiple scales. As being global in scope, these challenges require a coordination of global responses, a multi-disciplinary approach and an alignment of policy makers, scientific community and private sectors to work on shared priorities and collective actions (Woods 2013). The recent years have seen a rise of discourses from a range of government bodies, think tanks, NGOs and research institutions attempting to address these challenges, however they tend to be pitched at the abstract level and are rarely grounded in the specific localities or not often transcending boundaries in their application.

We are interested in analysing global challenges using an assemblage approach to uncover their diverse entanglements at different scales.

  • Firstly, we are interested in contributions that look at global challenges as assemblages. By acknowledging their complex dynamics, we question how global challenges emerge, re-emerge and their continuous process of becoming. In understanding their multiple networks, one way could be to look at how global challenges relate to each other and how they trigger each other. For instance, how are issues of water supply related to climate change? Or how are issues of food security linked to water or energy?
  • Secondly, the emphasis could be on how places emerge as local assemblages to address global challenges. How do such local assemblages combine material and immaterial elements to respond to issues of food security for example? How are they coded and decoded? Which are the actors locally and non-locally engaged in addressing such global issues?
  • Thirdly, another possible focus is on local and/or translocal conflicts arising from institutional responses to address global challenges or from development programs that do not address these issues. Which sort of social movement emerges to protest in favour of these issues? How do they mobilise (i.e. globally, locally and/or online)? Which types of alternative strategies are proposed by such assemblages to address key global challenges?

We are open to contributions that explore one or more of these approaches or any other way that employ the different influences of assemblage as an influential lens in understanding global challenges and their entanglements. In so doing, we encourage contributions that look at climate change, food security, energy stability, water management and/or disease in the global north and south. We are keen on engaging with research that relies on primary and secondary data sources, that has employed mixed methods, qualitative methods, quantitative approaches, and innovative uses of assemblage.

Deadline:: Tuesday 6th February 2018

Abstract should be approximately 250 words and include title, author’s name(s), affiliation(s), email(s), indicating the main presenter and submitted to the following:

Francesca Fois (;

Anthonia Ijeoma Onyeahialam (

Michael Woods (