[Commlist] Call for Papers: Royal Geographical Society IBG Annual Conference 2025 CfP - Relentless injustice: trauma, exhaustion and researching zombie problems (or banging your head against a wall)

Royal Geographical Society IBG Annual Conference 2025 CfP - Relentless 
injustice: trauma, exhaustion and researching zombie problems (or 
banging your head against a wall)
Session Organisers: Elizabeth Gagen (Aberystwyth University), Sinéad 
O’Connor (Aberystwyth University), Yvonne Ehrstein (Aberystwyth 
University), Emma Sheppard (Aberystwyth University)

In this session, we invite papers that consider the challenges, traumas 
and exhaustion of conducting research on topics and problems that refuse 
to go away, despite relentless and repeated research programmes designed 
to foster change. The term ‘zombie statistics’ has been used to describe 
data that are known to be inaccurate but retain a mythic and immoveable 
place in the popular imaginary. We suggest that this idea of the 'zombie 
problem' can be applied to a number of research contexts in which 
communities subject to epistemic injustices continuously re-experience 
the trauma of being unheard, in part because of a broader refusal to 
shift entrenched prejudice (Fricker, 2013) while researchers endlessly 
critique logics that refuse to fade. We invite discussion of the 
emotional exhaustion of continuing to confront familiar research 
problems that fail to translate into tangible change, alongside 
the emotional exhaustion of research from a position of lived experience.
Examples might include:
- Following Nash and Pinto’s (2024) reflections on feminist exhaustion, 
how might feminist geographers draw on and critique logics of care to 
confront the entrenched crisis within the neo-liberal university?
- How does the exhausting logic of misrecognition affect Trans research 
communities?
- Following Doreen Massey’s (2001) claim that policy makers have failed 
to listen to geographers’ findings about regional inequalities, how and 
why have relations between geographical theory and policy shifted?-
- How does black geographies continue to confront the trauma of 
continued racial violence and racial capitalism despite decades, if not 
centuries, of critical opposition?
- How do researchers working in critical obesity studies remain 
energised when challenging discriminatory practices that rely on 
inaccurate and debunked data, when they continue to be accepted within 
healthcare settings.
- Building on Sara Ahmed’s (2021) notion of complaint as feminist 
pedagogy, what is the value of complaining about ongoing power abuses in 
institutional and organisational settings?
- How do researchers cope with gender fatigue, resulting from the belief 
that gender equality is achieved, when being continuously exposed to 
stark evidence of inequalities/discrimination across multiple social 
spheres?

This will be an in-person session only due to limited availability of 
hybrid sessions. We welcome creative formats or approaches that can fit 
in a standard paper session.
Please email your abstract (max 250 words) to Sinéad O’Connor ( 
(sio13 /at/ aber.ac.uk)) and Yvonne Ehrstein ((yve /at/ aber.ac.uk)) by Friday 
February 28th.

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