[ASA_PEWS] Attached: Please circulate widely - Call for Papers, International J. of Comparative Sociology, "Predation and Dispossession ..."

Thu Jul 30 06:59:53 PDT 2026

attached

 *Call for Papers*

*      Predation and Dispossession in a World of Speculative Urbanizing:*

*Exploring Comparative Conjunctural Perspectives*

*Special Issue: International Journal of Comparative Sociology*

Guest Editor: Richard Tardanico (Florida International University)

*Key Dates:*

·         *February 1, 2027*—Abstract Submission Deadline

·         *February 15, 2027*—Notification of intention to include paper in
special issue

·         *March 15, 2027*—Initial submission of paper, begin peer review
process

Background:

The world’s transformative expansion of neoliberal capitalism dating from
the 1980s came to a crashing halt with the global financial crisis of 2008.
Entangled with ecosystem crisis, pandemic, and forever wars, the emerging
subsequent outcomes embed state machinery within an even more pronounced
concentration and centralization of increasingly digitalized,
boundary-crossing capital and widening socio-territorial inequalities. The
geographic contours of those emerging outcomes vary notably, of course,
across specific local institutional arrangements. Yet underpinning their
polarizing commonalities are the shared fundamentals of this century’s
extractive transnationalized logics: old and new forms of financialization,
speculation, predation, and dispossession.

Within that trajectory, urban(izing) real estate speculation—acquiring land
and property as assets intended for near-term profitable sale—has become a
more aggressive force for predation and dispossession, while also provoking
responses of resistance, contention, and accommodation. How can critical
scholarship go about making sense of such speculation’s local/supralocal
structures and processes of power, subordination, and popular response
across the twenty-first century world?

Scholars have analyzed urban and peri-urban speculative real estate
predation, dispossession, and popular responses from a range of
perspectives. This Call for Papers  solicits empirical work that critically
engages specifically with a *comparative conjunctural* *approach* whose
intellectual and political roots are grounded in theorizing by Antonio
Gramsci, Louis Althusser, and Stuart Hall. As articulated by Leitner and
Sheppard (2023) and Sheppard et al. (2024; see also, e.g., Hart, 2020,
2024; Charri et al., 2022; Goldman, 2023), the approach comprises three
interrelated tiers:

·         first, it adopts a multiscalar, conjunctural methodology that
invites attention to worldwide interconnections and comparisons;

·         second, it addresses the vertical as well as cross-cutting
horizontal layers of real estate speculation's politico-social
relationships;

·         and third, it takes seriously initiatives by subaltern groups to
parlay livelihood opportunities within those relationships into rights such
as employment, housing, and perhaps “the commoning practices so central to
their livelihoods” (Leitner and Sheppard, 2023: 362; see Holston, 2019).

This framework points to multiscalar, comparative conjunctures as revealing
not only spatio-historical forces of exploitation and dispossession but
also “slippages, openings, and contradictions where [oppositional] pressure
might be applied …” (Hart, 2020: 241; see Dikeç and Swyngedouw, 2017).
Complementarily, scholars such as Chakravarty and da Silva (2012), Noterman
(2022), Roy (2022), and Bufkin and Danewid (2026) emphasize the
ethno-racialization, past and present, of such forces, conjunctures,
practices, struggles, and transformations.

In critical engagement with comparative conjunctural theorizing, the
proposed special issue of *IJCS *seeks scholarship regardless of academic
discipline that explores two expansive themes within the changing contours
of twenty-first century capitalism:

·         How the predatory and dispossessive processes of contemporary
urban and peri-urban real estate speculation—whether financialized or
not—play out within and across the vast breadth of world-historically
situated global inequalities and local institutional diversities to, for
instance:

o   impose household and community hardships if perhaps also creating
interstitial social and economic opportunities;

o   urbanize populations while reshaping socio-relational and
politico-ecological metroscapes in wider territorial perspective;

o   generate future imaginaries while provoking varied class,
ethno-racialized, gendered, community, and other responses;

o   and facilitate or impede long-term progressive socio-spatial capacities
for resistance, contestation, and transformation.

·         The potential lessons for social and environmental-justice
organizing and action we might learn from the forms, successes,
limitations, defeats, and absences of popular responses to urban and
peri-urban real estate speculation under specific local-to-global relations
and comparative conjunctures.

The special issue welcomes submissions that empirically explore such topics
in urban and peri-urban settings while engaging—including critically—with
comparative conjunctural theorizing, broadly defined. All variety of case
studies are welcome (e.g., single, comparative, local/supralocal,
longitudinal), as are all methodological levels of analysis (including
biographical). While the special issue will focus on predatory and
dispossessive processes of real estate speculation within the changing
contours of twenty-first century capitalism, submissions that pose
questions and draw insights from earlier times are welcome.

·         Inquiries are welcome.

·         *Please send an extended abstract (approximately 1,000 words) of
your proposed paper to **richard.tardanico at fiu.edu*
<richard.tardanico at fiu.edu>* by February 1, 2027.  *

·         Decisions on abstracts will be sent by *February 15, 2027.*

·         Papers invited for submission will be due by *March 15, 2027*,
and will be forwarded to *IJCS*’s standard processes of peer review and
final editorial decision.

·         Invited papers should follow the Author Guidelines of the
International
Journal of Comparative Sociology
<https://journals.sagepub.com/author-instructions/COS>. Papers published in
*IJCS* are generally a maximum of 8,000 words (all sections inclusive).

*References*

Bufkin S, Danewid I (2026) Against fascist fantasies: Theorizing racial
capitalism in (Post)Imperial Europe. *South Atlantic Quarterly *125(1):
1–27.

https://doi.org/10.1215/00382876-12189469.

Chakravartty P, Ferreira da Silva D (2012) Accumulation, dispossession, and
debt: The racial logic of global capitalism—An introduction. *American
Quarterly* 64(3): 361–385. https://doi.org/10.1353/aq.2012.0033.

Charri S, Hunter M, Samson, M, eds. (2022) *Ethnographies of power: Working
radical concepts with Gillian Hart*. Johannesburg: Wits University Press.
https://doi.org/10.18772/22022076666*.*

Dikeç M, Swyngedouw E (2017) Theorizing the politicizing city. *International
Journal of Urban and Regional Research* 41(1): 1–18.
https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-2427.12388.

Goldman M (2023) Speculative urbanism and the urban-financial conjuncture:
Interrogating the afterlives of the financial crisis. *Environment and
Planning A: Economy and Space *55(2): 367-387.
https://doi.org/10.1177/0308518x211016003.

Hart G (2020*)* Why did it take so long? Trump-Bannonism in a global
conjunctural frame. *Geografiska Annaler: Series B, Human Geography* 102:
239–266.
https://doi.org/10.1080/04353684.2020.1780791.

Hart G (2024) Modalities of conjunctural analysis: “Seeing the present
differently” through global lenses. *Antipode *56(1): 135-164.
https://doi.org/10.1111/anti.12975.

Holston J (2019) Metropolitan rebellions and the politics of commoning the
city. *Anthropological Theory* 19(1): 120–142.
https://doi.org/10.1177/1463499618812324.

Leitner H, Sheppard E (2023) Unleashing speculative urbanism. *Environment
and Planning A: Economy and Space* 55(2): 359–366.
https://doi.org/10.1177/0308518X231151945.

Noterman E (2022) Speculating on vacancy. *Transactions of the Institute of
British Geographers* 47(1): 123–138.  https://doi.org/10.1111/tran.12477.

Roy A (2022) Grammars of dispossession: Racial banishment in the American
metropolis. In: Amin A, Lancione M, eds., *Grammars of the Urban Ground*,
41-57. Duke University Press.  https://doi.org/10.1215/9781478022954-003.

Sheppard E, Leitner H, Peck J (2024) Conjunctural analysis. *International
Encyclopedia of Geography: People, the Earth, Environment, and Technology*.
18 September.
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/9781118786352.wbieg2203.
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