Call for Papers: AAG 2016 San Francisco, CA
Title: The European Migration Crisis
Photographs, interviews and news reports covering the rising number of international migrants who are arriving along the European Union’s border or have died trying to reach Europe are now ubiquitous. This recent and unprecedented increase in the number of migrants destined for Europe is so startling it has been identified as a migration “crisis”. While internally the European Union’s Schengen common border agreement purports freedom of movement for its citizens, international migrants arriving at the border face numerous challenges and the European Union has increased spending for its border patrol operations since April 2015. Discrepancies between various member-states responses’ to migrants and their willingness to accept asylum applications complicate matters further.
The aim of this session is to critically examine this migration from a theoretical and/or empirical perspective. We are interested in investigating a variety of factors surrounding this crisis including conflicts at the EU border, local and/or national responses (e.g. resistance or support for migrants), and media portrayal of the crisis. In this CFP, we invite papers that investigate the aforementioned topics as well as topics including, but not limited to:
– Contestation surrounding EU or member-state regulations governing migration and refugee status, including external pressure on EU member-states to accept refugees
– Conflicts at borders and challenges faced by both migrants and receiving member-states
– Policies or beliefs (real or mistaken) that make certain member-states more desirable destinations than other EU member-states for migrants
– Investigation of geographic tropes, discourse(s) and global imaginaries that contribute to perceptions of this surge of migrants as a “crisis”
– Motivating factors that are driving many of these migrants out of their homeland
This session is sponsored by the Political Geography and European Specialty Groups. Reece Jones will serve as discussant for this session. Please send proposed titles and abstracts of no more than 250 words by email to Kara Dempsey (dempseyke@appstate.edu) by Friday, October 9, 2015.