Association of American Geographers
2016 Annual Meeting in San Francisco March 29-April 2
Co-organizers
Melinda Harm Benson and John Carr
University of New Mexico, Geography and Environmental Studies
In their edited volume Expanding the Spaces of Law (2014), Irus Braverman, Nicholas Blomley, David Delaney and Alexandre (Sandy) Kedar identify three main streams or modes of scholarship in legal geography to date: (1) disciplinary work in law or in geography that is modeled on the conventional image of import and export (2) interdisciplinary pursuit in which scholars in the eponymous fields draw on the work of each other and seek to contribute to the development of a common project and (3) investigations that move beyond legal geography to trans-disciplinary, or perhaps even post-disciplinary, modes of scholarship. Within the third category, investigative approaches increasingly emphasize performativity as a basis of inquiry. Braverman and her colleagues describe performance theory as form of open-ended social constructionism that places an emphasis on the iterative and citational nature of performances that, in their complex assemblages, stabilize particular social arrangements. An emphasis on how law is performed highlights its ontological role (Blomley 2013). These performances take place in the “everyday”—situations ranging from the daycare center and the supermarket to the football stadium and the national park.
We invite papers and across the various modes of scholarship. Past sessions have been organized around themes including: law/colonialism/capitalism, property, methods, political economy/law and human/environment/law.
Please send this on to other individuals or specialty groups that may be interested in this call. Hope to see you in San Francisco!
