Ideational geographies: exploring the “spatial lives” of economic ideas
An invitational workshop hosted at UBC’s Green College, Vancouver, June 11-13, 2025
Convened by geographers and historians at UBC, with the support of SSHRC, EPA: Economy & Space, and UBC, this three-day interdisciplinary workshop will explore the theme of “ideational geographies.”
EPA: Economy & Space will fund up to eight travel and accommodation stipends to enable doctoral students and postdoctoral researchers to participate in the workshop. To apply, please send a one-page extended abstract of the paper that you wish to present, supplemented with a half-page biography and an estimate of travel costs (economy airfares) to jamie.peck@ubc.ca, no later than December 20, 2024. (The costs of local accommodation will be covered.)
The workshop
Focusing on the (historical) geography of economic ideas, substantively and theoretically, the workshop will ask where they come from, how they travel and mutate along the way, and how they engage and change the world. Although these issues have been recognized in the work of intellectual historians, sociologists, public-policy scholars, and political economists of various stripes, with but a few exceptions the geography of ideas tends to be acknowledged mostly in descriptive or metaphorical terms. Meanwhile, for their part, political and economic geographers have tended to explore ideas and ideation in a scattershot fashion, rather than systematically.
Across the interdisciplinary literature on ideas and ideation, however, there have been indications of an incipient “spatial turn,” especially in intellectual history, comparative political economy, and economic sociology. On the other hand, some economic and political geographers have been developing the case for a more sustained and rigorous engagement with ideas and ideation.
These convergent conditions provide both the pretext and the charge for the UBC workshop. Workshop participants are invited to problematize spatial “moments” and the constitutive role of geography in processes and practices of ideation, drawing out theoretical, methodological, and political implications in the context of the substantive concerns of their papers. To this end, the workshop will bring together a select group of geographers and some of the most creative and versatile contributors to the fast-developing interdisciplinary literature on ideas and ideation. Confirmed participants include: Elizabeth Popp Berman (Sociology, Michigan), Jacqueline Best (Political Science, Ottawa), Brett Christophers (Geography, Uppsala), Beverley Mullings (Geography & Planning, Toronto), Dieter Plehwe (WZB, Berlin), Quinn Slobodian (History, Boston University), Jim Stanford (Centre for Work Futures), and Ndongo Samba Sylla (International Development Economics Associates, Dakar).
Planned outcomes of the workshop include an edited collection, to be published in Agenda’s Economic Transformations series and a theme issue of the journal, EPA: Economy & Space.
The organizers of the ideational geographies workshop are: Jamie Peck, Trevor Barnes, Peter James Hudson, and Jessica Wang. Further information can be obtained from Jamie Peck jamie.peck@ubc.ca.