*Call for Papers: AAG Annual Meeting 2016, 29 March – 2 April, San Francisco*
New Discourses of the Old Nation-State: Territories, Identities, Practices
Session convenor: Ingrid A. Medby (Durham University, UK), Berit Kristoffersen (UiT – The Arctic University of Norway)
Sponsored by the Political Geography Specialty Group.
In a time of ever accelerating global interconnectedness, mobility, migration, and climate change, the state has frequently been relegated to political anachronisms in academic analysis. Despite decades of heralding the state as obsolete, however, it tenaciously persists as the primary unit of territorial, political, and bio-political organisation. Moreover, while congruence of borders, authority, and community may never have been more than an illusion, the Westphalian idea(l) of the culturally legitimate “nation-state” likewise persists, reifying state authority as this undergoes profound transformation. Thus, rather than seeing the state as a static, separate, monolithic and de-humanised entity in its own right, critical political geographers are increasingly attuned to its “peopled” (Jones, 2007) and prosaic (Painter, 2006) nature. As an idea and construct (Abrams, 1988), the state materialises as an effect of a range of practices (Mitchell 1993) and is actively transformed through socio-political struggles at various geographical scales (Brenner 2004).
This session aims to interrogate how the state, the nation, or indeed the “nation-state” is re-negotiated, re-imagined, and re-interpreted in today’s world. Papers are invited that foster discussion of how territories and identities are formed and transformed in practice and through political imaginaries. The session thus aims to provide fresh perspectives on the meaning of statehood as performance and narrative.
The session’s theme is designed to be broad in order to attract a wide range of perspectives with the aim of fostering dialogue on the state that goes beyond traditional state theory. Researchers are encouraged to submit abstracts that relate to topics broadly engaging with the above, and may include (but are not limited to):
The state/statehood as:
- Practices, performances, or ceremonies.
- Identity, nationalism, or citizenship.
- Borders, territories, or territoriality.
- Multiscaled, nested, or fragmented.
- Everyday, mundane, or banal.
- Discourses, ideas, or narratives.
Please email your abstract of no more than 250 words (or any questions you may have) to Ingrid A. Medby (i.a.medby@durham.ac.uk) by Monday 19th October 2015. Please include affiliation, contact details, etc.
Successful applicants will be notified by 23rd October, and will have to pay the registration fee and submit their abstracts online at the AAG website before 29th October 2015.
Unfortunately no financial support towards travel/accommodation/registration can be provided by the session convenor.
References:
Abrams, P., 1988. Notes on the Difficulty of Studying the State [1977]. Journal of Historical Sociology 1, 58–89.
Brenner, N., 2004. New state spaces: Urban governance and rescaling of statehood. Oxford University Press, New York.
Jones, R., 2007. People/States/Territories: The Political Geographies of British State Transformation, RGS-IBG book series. Blackwell, Oxford.
Mitchell, T., 1991. The Limits of the State: Beyond Statist Approaches and Their Critics. The American Political Science Review 85(1), 77-96.
Painter, J., 2006. Prosaic geographies of stateness. Political Geography 25, 752–774.