2013 POLITICAL GEOGRAPHY SPECIALTY GROUP PRECONFERENCE

UCLA, Los Angeles, CA, April 08 2013

The PGSG and the Department of Geography at UCLA are very pleased to announce that the 2013 PGSG Preconference will be held at UCLA in Westwood, Los Angeles on Monday April 8 2013. The paper sessions will take place during the day. The PGSG will host a group dinner for preconference participants during the evening.

The preconference will be held at the UCLA Faculty Center, located at 480 Charles E. Young Drive East in Westwood.

Directions to the Faculty Center and an interactive UCLA campus map are available at http://facultycenter.ucla.edu/directions.htm and http://maps.ucla.edu/campus/, respectively.

A campus map suitable for printing or storing on a portable device can be found at http://www.ucla.edu/pdf/ucla-campus-map.pdf.

8:00 – 8:30 Check-in, registration, and continental breakfast (Faculty Center)
8:30 – 8:45 Welcoming remarks (Sequoia Room)
8:45 – 10:45 Sessions I and II
10:45 – 11:00 Coffee break
11:00 – 12:45 Sessions III and IV
12:45 – 2:00 Lunch
2:00 – 4:00 Sessions V and VI
4:00 – 4:15 Break
4:15 – 6:00 Session VII and VIII
6:00 – 6:30 Reception (Bunche Hall 1261)
6:30 – 7:30 Plenary panel
8:00 – PGSG Annual Dinner (details TBD)

$20 registration fee for faculty and postdocs, receipts provided; no fee for grads

Room and bldg details, link to map @ http://www.politicalgeography.org/aagannounce.html

Sequoia Room

Mat Coleman, Department of Geography, Ohio State University
Adam Moore, Department of Geography, UCLA

Session I: Violence and security - Redwood Room
Chair: Shannon O’Lear, Department of Geography, University of Kansas

1 ) Operating in the margins:  USAID, (alternative) development, and the (counter)insurgent geographies of the Cold War
Wes Attewell
Department of Geography, University of British Columbia

2) Mechanisms explaining the spatio-temporal diffusion of violence in sub-Saharan Africa
Andrew M. Linke
Department of Geography, University of Colorado

3) Transecting security and space in Phnom Penh
James D Sidaway, Till F Paasche and Chih Yuan Woon 
Department of Geography, National University of Singapore

4) Salvadoran security and the convergence of public and private protection
Peter D. A. Wood
Department of Geography
Florida State University

5) The travels of a tactic: where will international accompaniment for peace go next?
Sara Koopman,
Balsillie School of International Affairs, Wilfrid Laurier University

Session II: Borders  - Sequoia Room
Chair: Mat Coleman, Department of Geography, Ohio State University

1) Settler colonialism on the Arizona/Sonora border:  queer theory, indigenous geographies, and the nation-state
Carrie Mott
Department of Geography, University of Kentucky

2) Deepening the dialectical landscape: narco tunnels and the political economy of the subterranean U.S.-Mexico border
Cynthia Sorrensen
Department of Geography and Geosciences, Texas Tech University.

3) Behind the smoke and mirrors: post-deportation interviews about apprehension, detention and deportation procedures
Jeremy Slack
School of Geography and Development, University of Arizona

4) The (neo)liberal subject of contemporary U.S. border enforcement
Geoffrey Boyce
School of Geography and Development, University of Arizona

 5) The geopolitical meaning of a contemporary visual art upsurge on the Canada-U.S. border
Anne-Laure Amilhat Szary
Institut de Géographie Alpine, Université Joseph Fourier

Session III: Rethinking nation and place  - Redwood Room
Chair: Reece Jones, Department of Geography, University of Hawai’i Manoa

1) Synecdoche and the city: state, citizen, and spectacle in Kazakhstan
Natalie Koch
Department of Geography, The Maxwell School, Syracuse University

2) The resilience of the “territorial trap”: state-led representations and ordinary performances in producing Taiwanese and North Korean national spaces
Alessandro Tiberio
Department of Geography, University of California, Berkeley

3) Negotiating language borders and linguistic borderlands
Virginie Mamadouh
Department of Geography, Planning and International Development Studies, University of Amsterdam

4) Rethinking Bosnian postcoloniality: challenges of the Europeanization discourse
Danijela Majstorović
Center for European and Eurasian Studies, International Institute, UCLA

Session IV: Affect, agency, and aliens - Sequoia Room
Chair: Jason Dittmer, Department of Geography, University College London

1) Action theory after the practice turn: assembling the future
Huib Ernste
Human Geography, Radboud University

2) Locating agency: reading against the grain
Cheryl Gilge
College of Built Environments, University of Washington

3) David Foster Wallace and radical democracy
Mark Purcell
Department of Urban Design & Planning, University of Washington

4) Sovereign alien says "What?": sovereignty in The Avengers, Avatar, and District 9
Ben Schrager
Department of Geography, University of Hawai’i Manoa

Session V: Encounters and memory  - Redwood Room
Chair: Adam Moore, Department of Geography, UCLA

1) Human geography’s polymorphous spaces of interaction
Veit Bachmann, Department of Human Geography, Goethe-University Frankfurt

2) Summer in the Soviet Union: the Artek youth delegations of the National Council of American-Soviet Friendship and the spatial regulation of encounter
Ulrich Best
Canadian Center for German and European Studies & Department of Geography, York University

3)  Koza as a borderland: memories of the anti-US riot and place-based
identities
Takashi Yamazaki
Graduate School of Literature and Human Sciences, Osaka City University

4) On affective heritage: posthumanism and the Australian War Memorial
Jason Dittmer, Department of Geography, University College London
Emma Waterton
Institute for Culture and Society, University of Western Sydney

5) Where’s the state? Memory, identity & power in the Lebanese capital
Ali Hamdan
Department of Geography, UCLA

Session VI: Law and Policy - Sequoia Room
Chair: Fred Shelley, Department of Geography, University of Oklahoma

1) Enactments of foreign policy expertise: insights from Ukrainian think tanks
Ievgenii Rovnyi
Department of Human Geography, Goethe University of Frankfurt am Main

2) Intra-party gerrymandering and the shape of congressional districts
 Kenneth C. Martis
Professor Emeritus of Geography, West Virginia University

3) ‘Counting’ at home or in the big house: prisoners and the decennial census in the U.S.A.
Matthew L. Mitchelson
Department of Geography and Anthropology, Kennesaw State University

4) The hybrid legal geographies of war crimes trials
Alex Jeffrey
Department of Geography, University of Cambridge
Michaelina Jakala
School of Geography, Politics and Sociology, Newcastle University

5) Targeting military lawyers
Craig Jones
Department of Geography, University of British Columbia

Session VII: Environmental and medical geographies  - Redwood Room

Chair: Corey Johnson, University of North Carolina - Greensboro

1) The (not so) phantom menace: reviewing Kaplan’s Revenge of Geography
Shannon O’Lear, John Biersack, David J. Trimbach, Nathaniel Ray Pickett, Department of Geography, University of Kansas

2) Virtual climate justice: assessing regional effects of climate engineering technologies
Thilo Wiertz
IASS, Heidelberg University

3) Cape York’s world heritage dilemma:  power dynamics on the environmental frontier
Nick Skilton
Department of Geography, University of Wollongong

4) The mapping of provinces and populations: socio-medical geographies of the early Turkish republic
Kyle T. Evered
Department of Geography, Michigan State University
Emine Ö. Evered
Department of History, Michigan State University

5) TBD
Michael Webb, OSU

Session VIII: Law, maps, transnationalism … and anarchy! - Sequoia Room
Chair: Anne-Laure Amilhat Szary, Institut de Géographie Alpine, Université Joseph Fourier

1)Islamic activism in Bosnia and Herzegovina and Serbia's Sandžak of Novi Pazar: transnational networks and territorial strategies
Mahmood Khan
Department of Geography, UCLA

2) Placing Palestine: maps, territories, & imaginaries
Karen Culcasi
Department of Geology and Geography, West Virginia University

3) Somewhere between law and implementation: the politics of immigration statuses between occupied territories
Brittany Cook
Department of Geography, University of Kentucky

4) Locating resistance in multi-level migration governance regimes: a US/EU comparison
Michael Collyer
Department of Geography, University of Sussex 

5) Why a radical geography must be anarchist
Simon Springer, Department of Geography, University of Victoria

UCLA Department of Geography, Bunche Hall 1261

Chair: Mat Coleman, Department of Geography, Ohio State University

Panelists:

John Agnew, Department of Geography, UCLA
Joanne Sharp, School of Geographical and Earth Sciences, University of Glasgow
Simon Dalby, Balsillie School of International Affairs , Wilfrid Laurier University
Natalie Koch, The Maxwell School, Syracuse University
Sara Koopman, Balsillie School of International Affairs , Wilfrid Laurier University

Accommodation

The PGSG will not be booking a block of rooms for the preconference because hotel rates in Los Angeles are very competitive. We recommend basic search engines like www.hotels.com and www.priceline.com for the best rates.

Some walkable hotel options in Westwood include:
http://www.claremonthotel.net/id2.html
http://www.wlosangeles.com/
http://www.hotelpalomar-lawestwood.com/
http://www.beverlyhillsplazahotel.com/
http://www.hilgardhouse.com/
http://royalpalacewestwood.room-ez.com/.

The UCLA campus is easily accessible using public transport (see below). As a result, preconference participants may want to travel to UCLA from their hotel near the main conference.

Travel

The UCLA campus is located on the north side of West Los Angeles, in Westwood. Preconference attendees have a number of public transport options to get to campus:

LA Metro Bus lines 2, 302 and 761.
http://www.metro.net/
System maps available at http://www.metro.net/riding/maps/

Santa Monica Big Blue Bus lines 1, 2, 3, 8, and 12. (Note that Santa Monica Line 3 can be taken from the LAX Airport City Bus Center to just blocks from campus. The ride is approximately an hour and 20 minutes, depending on traffic.)
http://bigbluebus.com/
System maps available at http://bigbluebus.com/Routes-And-Schedules/Routes---Schedules.aspx

Culver City Green Bus Line 6.
http://www.culvercity.org/Government/Transportation/Bus.aspx
A system map is available at http://www.culvercity.org/Government/Transportation/~/media/Files/Bus/CCBUS_System_Map.ashx

Should you want to drive (which the organizers do not recommend, due to the high cost of parking), a UCLA parking map can be found at http://map.ais.ucla.edu/go/1002187.