John Agnew is Distinguished Professor of Geography at UCLA with research interests in Political Geography, International Political Economy, European Urbanization, and Italy. During his studies, he left the UK for the USA, where he completed his Ph.D (from Ohio State U.) before engaging into a research career which has involved to-and-fros between the old and new worlds. His interest in Italian politics has certainly been a catalyst of these journeys, but he has always been attentive to the European scientific production and its multi-lingual context. The journal he has founded, Territory, Politics, Governance is a current witness of his very wide research interests and of the connections he has thrived to build between different academic worlds.

https://www.geog.ucla.edu/people/john-agnew

Having the pleasure to host Prof. J. Agnew at Grenoble-University this month, we would like to share the dialogue a group of European geographers has engaged with him: we have invited one of his co-authors, Luca Muscarà, one of his co-editors, Virginie Mamadouh, and the two people in charge of the French Commission for Political Geography at the IGU, Anne-Laure Amilhat Szary and Amael Cattaruzza, to engage into this conversation.

The aim of the day is to hear John Agnew’s views on the links that he has constantly been building to build fieldwork and a conceptual trajectory that embraces Europe and North America. This will be an exceptional opportunity to reflect on the connections and disconnections and reverberations between the different traditions in Political Geography, with the constitution of centers and peripheries, due to language issues but not only. Behind the multiple connections that the participants will try to highlight, insisting on the history of this Euro-American scholarship, we will also address the possible silences around his work, due to a lack of communication between disciplines, or even between the subfields of our discipline, human geography.

The discussion following the presentations will give the floor to PhD students that want to engage into the debates. The day will end up with a mini field trip in Grenoble, to the Bastille heights.

WELCOMING CAFÉ : 8h45- 9H15

ROUND TABLE #1 : 8H45-12H00
9H15- 10H John Agnew, UCLA: "Doing Political Geography: The Careers of Critical Geopolitics and Place and Politics";
10h-10h30 Virginie Mamadouh, University of Amsterdam: “De-bordering political geography”
10h30-11h Amaël Cattaruzza, Centre de Recherche des écoles de Saint-Cyr Coëtquidan: “Sovereingty in Cyberspace : a Topological Trap? ”
11h-12h : DEBATE WITH THE ROOM, including presentations of research questions and case studies by Ph.D  Students

12h- 13h30 : LUNCH

ROUND TABLE #2:  13H

13h30- 14h15 : John Agnew, UCLA:"Know-where: How Geography can Contribute to Political Studies."

14h15- 14h45: Luca Muscarà, Universita degli Studi del Molise: “ Making Political Geography : between Theories and History”

14h45- 15h15: Anne-Laure Amilhat Szary, Grenoble-Alpes University: “Territory unplugged ? The topicality of the border trap”

15h15- 16h15 : DEBATE WITH THE ROOM, including presentations of research questions and case studies by Ph.D  Students

16h15- 16h30 : Conclusions and Perspectives

17h-19h : UP the BASTILLE with John AGNEW : political readings of landscape.

Organisé en partenariat avec la Commission Géographie politique et géopolitique