We are looking for a couple more people to finalize the discussion panel, but if there is sufficient interest, then we will expand to two sessions.
Please send in a short description of what you’d like to focus on or talk about, with your name, affiliation, and contact info to both the organizers by November 10, 2015: Dr. Farhana Sultana (sultanaf@syr.edu) and Marien González-Hidalgo (marien.gonzalezhidalgo@gmail.com).
Thanks!

2016 AAG Conference CFP

Title: Emotional Political Ecologies

Session Organisers:
Farhana Sultana (Associate Professor of Geography, Syracuse University)
Marien González-Hidalgo (Entitle PhD Fellow, University of Chile)

Abstract:
Emotions imbue environmental governance, resource use, and nature-society conflicts, but the relationship between emotions, power, and environmental change has only recently been systematically studied. Emotional political ecology is emerging as a field of study in geography and beyond, and this approach elucidates how emotions matter in nature–society relations, moving beyond rational resource users or managers to flesh out fuller and feeling subjects that complicate and enrich current understandings of nature-society relationships (Sultana 2015). Recent scholarship has brought together various strands of political ecology, emotional and affective geographies, feminist geography, and other theories into rich conversation that contribute to this emerging field (e.g. Sultana 2011; Nightingale 2011; Singh 2013; Morale and Harris 2014). This discussion panel aims to advance the study of emotions and affect within political ecology by fostering a debate about theoretical frameworks and action research agendas that can contribute to understanding everyday corporal and emotional experiences taking place in the course of environmental governance and/or conflict. We aim to elaborate and expand the role of emotions in the triad power-knowledge-subjectivities, and advance how the consideration of emotions can support both the action and research of environmental change.
Some questions we will consider, but are not limited to, are the following:
* What does the study of emotions add in helping us understand environmental change and conflicts?
* What is the role of emotions and “the affective” in relationships between power, knowledge and subjectivities?
* How do affective and emotional processes facilitate governmentality and subject-making, commoning, and resistance?
* How can we develop research in political ecology (particularly feminist and post-colonial/anti-colonial political ecology) that integrates further the embodied, emotional, and spiritual aspects of the production of socionatures?

References cited:
Morales, M., & Harris, L. 2014. “Using Subjectivity and Emotions to Reconsider Participatory Resource Management” World Development, 64: 703-712.
Nightingale, A. 2011. “Beyond Design Principles: Subjectivity, Emotion, and the (Ir)Rational Commons” Society and Natural Resources, 24, 119-132.
Singh, N. M., 2013. “The affective labor of growing forests and the becoming of environmental subjects: Rethinking environmentality in Odisha, India” Geoforum, 47: 189–198.
Sultana, F., 2011. “Suffering for water, suffering from water: Emotional geographies of resource access, control and conflict” Geoforum, 42(2), 163–172.
Sultana, F., 2015, “Emotional Political Ecology” In The International Handbook of Political Ecology, Raymond Bryant (Ed.), Edward Elgar Publishing, UK. Pp. 633-645.

This session explores the prospect of radical social transformation by critically examining the praxis of science, activism, and policy through a postclassical lens. Four confirmed papers explore moving from quantum social theory to social practice; employing narrative analysis as a framework for understanding ontological security at the Arctic ice edge; identifying NJ boundary organizations focusing on climate change and feminist science studies; and rethinking agency through a propositional infraglobalization approach. We encourage papers that explicitly relate critical ontology approaches with agency and empirical studies.

From ontological shifts to action on the ground:

Enacting agency for transformation through post-classical praxis

This paper session explores emergent ways of thinking about social transformation in the face of apparently overwhelming and complex challenges in natural-human systems. Papers take up approaches that pay heed to the relationship between ontology and materiality. These approaches draw from post-classical worldviews that increasingly influence the social sciences in implicit and explicit ways, and highlight the importance of narrative, metaphor and subjective meaning in approaching risk and vulnerability, and enacting social transformation. While the ‘ontological turn’ has resulted in a rethinking of key classical concepts, especially binaries, this session is concerned with how ontological shifts affect and shape action on the ground and positive political outcomes.

A number of prospects for radical social change are examined, with agency understood through a post-classical social scientific lens, from approaches to climate change action to Arctic biodiversity to globalization alternatives. In so doing, the limits of classical approaches and the discounting of consciousness, intentionality and subjectivity are considered relative to the urgent need for complex transformations in shaping material realities. The papers explore how new approaches might succeed where classical approaches with modernist ontological commitments were lacking. The session papers are concerned with theorizations of both agency and ontology and how these might inform radical reconfigurations of ways of seeing, being and doing to meet the complex and uncertain challenges ahead.

Some questions to stimulate discussion and debate:

• How does ontological innovation translate into material and behavioral change?
• What are the prospects for post-classical paradigms and ways of knowing and how can they effectively translate into ways of doing in natural and human systems?
• How does the entanglement of individual and collective action change when we question the classical underpinnings of social science?
• What is the role of intersubjectivity, intentionality and subjective phenomena in enacting deliberate and deliberative social change?
• What does a probabilistic rather than deterministic social science imply for the outcomes of scenarios for collaborations and negotiations?
• How can alternative approaches do praxis differently in ways that are attentive to questions of justice, empowerment, power and violence?

Discussant: TBA depending on final cumber of presenters.

Submission Guidelines: Please submit abstracts of 250 words or less along with your presenter PIN and affiliation by October 29, 2015 toann.elkhoury@mq.edu.au. Participants will be confirmed and their abstracts added to the session on October 29.

CORRUPT PLACES: THE ILLICIT IN THE GOVERNANCE AND DEVELOPMENT OF
CITIES, REGIONS AND NETWORKS
Edited by Francesco Chiodelli (Gran Sasso Science Institute, Italy),
Tim Hall (University of Winchester, UK) and Ray Hudson (University of
Durham, UK)
[proposal to Routledge]

Call for chapter proposals for a volume which offers an innovative
multidisciplinary collection exploring the roles of illicit actors of
various kinds in processes of urban and regional governance and
development, and the effects of illicit networks on the spaces and
places in which they are grounded and to which they are connected.

*Deadline for chapter proposals: 30th November 2015

**Book outline, instructions for prospective authors, and timeline at:
www.gssi.infn.it/images/dottorati/scienze-sociali/Corrupt_Places_Book_Proposal_DEF.pdf

• What practices of governance control Arctic space and place?

• How are practices conceived across time and space?

• By whom or what are such practices conceived?

• What values are at stake in the development of Arctic space and place?

• How are subjectivities expressed and politicised in practices of governance?

• What ‘other’ identities are apparent in practices of governance?

• Has there always been an ‘Arctic’ space and place?

Call for Papers: AAG Annual Meeting, San Francisco, March 29 – April 2, 2016

Session title: “Geo-economics: geographer’s innovation in economics. Beyond the neoliberal economics“

Session Convenors: Balázs Forman (Department of Economic Geography and Future Studies, Corvinus University of Budapest)

In many regions of the World, very serious socio-territorial changes are currently happening in non-core areas. As in other parts of the world, most development in Latin America, in Central Europe, or in East Asia is. recently peripheral and differs from ‘classical’ economic development in North Atlantic countries.

One characteristic of recent economic development is the high dependency and/or interdependence on core countries and on world market.

As a result, previously peripherial and semi-peripherial countries in the vicinity of economic growth hubs are changing rapidly.

However, peripheries of world economy are not only affected by the geographical expansion of their role in spatial division of labour leading to dispersed forms of economic development in the core-periphery connection.

In a general sense, it seems that semi-peripherial countries are becoming a more central arena under neoliberal capitalism in World economy, leading to spatial reconfigurations as well as social, ecological and economic disruptions. But, the perpherial countries and/or regions are losing their ground in World economy.

However, up to now, much existing work has focused on economic development of North America and Europe, while systematized reflections on developments in Latin America, in Central Europe and etc. have been underrepresented.

Moreover, the developments in between the developed and undeveloped worlds may require a re-thinking of existing approaches to understand the role of the spatial in current modes of capital accumulation.

For instance, there has been interaction between economic geography, development geography and geography and economics of different world regions and those studying the political economy, while both could benefit from each other.

This panel brings together scholars to discuss the natures, causes, consequences, and politics of the dynamics taking place in peripheries and semi-peripheries of World economy, in order to enhance our understanding of the role of these spaces for current processes of neoliberal development.

We invite proposals for papers addressing (but not limited to) one or more of the following questions:

• What are the characteristics of current changes in the peripherial and semi-peripherial countries or regions, and (how) do they differ from processes of economic growth and development of core countries?
• How do these changes relate to current modes of capital accumulation, such as the increasing power of finance capital?
• What makes these spaces special and attractive for new forms of commodification?
• What are the social, ecological and economic effects of the new spatial division of labour and/or configurations?
• How does development in the periphery interrelate with technical change?
• How is it linked to the commodification of nature and a re-distribution of access to natural resources and their benefits?
• Are peripherial spaces also new arenas of resistance to neoliberal globalization?

The session is linked to an edited book we are planning to submit with a well-established international academic publisher that has shown keen interest in the project.

Please send your abstract of not more than 250 words to the session convenors, balazs.forman@uni-corvinus.hu by November 2nd, 2015.

Call for Papers: AAG Annual Meeting, San Francisco, CA, 29 March – 2 April 2016 – Deadline extended to 26 October 2015

. 
Session Title: The post-post-Soviet space? Interrogating the region in the quarter century since communism’s end

Organizers: Ted Holland, Havighurst Postdoctoral Fellow, Miami University of Ohio, hollance@miamioh.edu <mailto:<mailto:and Matthew Derrick, Assistant Professor of Geography, Humboldt State University, Matthew.Derrick@humboldt.edu.

Submissions: Please send expressions of interest in the panel session and abstracts for the paper session to Ted Holland (hollanec@miamioh.edu<mailto:) by 26 October 2015.

Mitchneck, B. 2005. Geography Matters: Discerning the Importance of Local Context. Slavic Review 64 (3): 491-516.

Panel Title: Tourism, Militarization and Nation-Building

The papers in this panel examine the intersection of tourism, militarization and nation-building in diverse geopolitical contexts. Specifically, papers explore the various ways in which narratives of tourism sites are frequently mediated by competing discourses perpetuated by the tourism industry, the military-industrial complex and the state. As such, papers in this panel will challenge what Teaiwa (1999) has referred to as “militourism” or “a phenomenon by which military or paramilitary force ensures the smooth running of a tourist industry, and that same tourist industry masks the military force behind it.”  Thus, papers in this panel will address Teaiwa’s observation that while the military and tourism industries provide opportunities of employment and social mobility, the impacts on land through environmental as well as sociocultural components of “host” communities have been decidedly contested (Teaiwa 1999). In a similar vein, Gonzalez (2013) pays attention to the mutual work of militarism and tourism in examining the “possibilities of American historical and contemporary dominance” in Asia and the Pacific region, indicating its wide implications of better understanding of tourism and military geography. Teaiwa and Gonzalez’s work, among others, paved the way for future examinations of the convergences of militarism and tourism. For example, emerging work in this field addresses processes in which militarization and tourism influence economic and cultural landscapes through nation-building projects as well as resistance to the development vis-a-vis social movement.  Ultimately, this panel aims to contribute to new understandings of how discourses and practices of tourism and militarism articulate with narratives of security, place and the state.

We welcome papers that engage with the topics related but not limited to occupation, memories of war, battlefield tours, gender/military/tourism, postcolonialism, demilitarization tours, activism and tourism, and social movement participation.

Please send your abstract of 200 words or less to Sayaka Sakuma at ss26@hawaii.edu and Kyle Kajihiro at kkajihir@hawaii.edu by October 25, 2015.

Sayaka Sakuma | Kyle Kajihiro

Unviersity of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa

ss26@hawaii.edu | kkajihir@hawaii.edu

Call For Papers: American Association of Geographers (AAG), Annual Meeting, San Francisco, CA. March 29th – April 2nd, 2016

New Geographies of Alienation: Getting Reacquainted with Estrangement

Organizers:
Alex Colucci, Kent State University
Stian Rice, Kent State University

Marx’s concept of alienation, first put forward in his 1844 Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts, links the structural organization of the modern labor process with its devastating effect on human beings, “on their physical and mental states and on the social processes of which they are a part” (Ollman 1976, 131). As a process of disconnecting and distancing humans from nature and from each other, it is somewhat surprising that alienation has received infrequent attention from geographers (see Evans, 1978; Peet 1978; Mitchell 2003; Olwig 2005). This session explores (1) whether alienation – in either new or classical interpretations – can be useful for emerging trends in geographic thought, and (2) how these trends might extend, expand, or contradict Marx’s original argument.

Marx identified four forms of alienation in the modern labor process. First, workers are alienated from the product of their labor. Second, workers are alienated from the act of production. Under capitalism, a worker must labor in order to survive, making the laboring act one of ‘deadening compulsion’ rather than free choice. Third, workers are alienated from species-being (Gattungswesen). Reduced by capital into exchangeable and expendable parts for the machinery of production, the labor process denies workers their essential ‘humanness.’ Finally, as a consequence of the first three, workers are alienated from other humans through the collective separation of humanity from its species-being, and the demands of a labor market that pits each person in direct competition for survival.

This session seeks geographic work related to the processes of disconnection, distancing, and estrangement complicit in alienation. Prospective abstracts need not focus solely on labor processes alone. Indeed, we encourage new or unconventional approaches and subjects, either theoretical or case-based. Possible areas of interest include (but certainly are not limited to):

• Political geography, political ecology, radical geography, and cultural geography.
• Critical race theory
• Post- and non-human geography
• Socio-nature studies
• Landscape studies
• Material geographies
• Actor-networks
• Migration and detainment studies
• Literary geography

Interested participants should send their abstract (250 words max) to either Alex Colucci (acolucc3@kent.edu) or Stian Rice (srice14@kent.edu) by Oct 25, 2015.

References:

Evans, David M. 1978. “Alienation, Mental Illness and the Partioning of Space.” Antipode 10 (1): 13–23.

Mitchell, Don. 2003. “Cultural Landscapes: Just Landscapes or Landscapes of Justice?” Progress in Human Geography 27 (6): 787–96.

Marx, Karl. 2013. “Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844.” Start Publishing LLC.

Ollman, Bertell. 1976. Alienation: Marx’s Conception of Man in a Capitalist Society. Cambridge University Press.

Olwig, Kenneth R. 2005. “Representation and Alienation in the Political Land-Scape.” Cultural Geographies 12 (1): 19–40.

Peet, Richard. 1978. “The Geography of Human Liberation.” Antipode 10-11 (3-1): 119–134.