CALL FOR PAPERS: Annual Meeting of the Association of American Geographers (AAG), San Francisco, CA, March 29–April 2, 2016.
Geographies of State Terror
After forty-three students were disappeared one year ago from the streets of Iguala, Guerrero, Mexican citizens took to the streets by the hundreds of thousand, crying “Fue el Estado” – It was the State. This cry of grief and rage resonates with a complex global geography of violence that is sanctioned, designed, and administered by apparatuses of state power. In convening a session on Geographies of State Terror, we seek to better understand where and why the state terrorizes people.
State terrorism is nothing new. However, several twenty-first century political and economic shifts have altered these old forms of violence in pernicious and important ways. First, since September 11, 2001, the state has developed new technologies and claimed new license to surveille, apprehend, and even assassinate. Expansive new definitions of criminals and enemy combatants have authorized preemptive action against targeted likely threats, profiled by race, gender, religion, and nationality. Second, amidst the wreckage of the post-2008 financial crisis, renewed neoliberal and austerity policies have served to further consolidate wealth and accelerate the dispossession of the global poor. Third, these growing, discontented populations of surplus humanity are a source of increasing anxiety among the political and economic elite. This shifting terrain – in which state apparatuses seek to produce and punish terrorized subjects – demands innovative scholarship and solidarities.
We seek, through this session, to bring these three trends into conversation with one another toward a deeper, clearer understanding of how state terrorism operates and what it accomplishes.
Topics for proposed papers could include, but are not limited to:
- Militarized and anticipatory policing
- State-sanctioned extra-legal and paramilitary violence
- Mass incarceration and detention
- Border security and deportations
- Racist and trans/homophobic profiling
- “counter-terrorist” strikes
- Institutions of impunity
- Vagabond capitalism and social reproduction
- Terror in the spaces of everyday life
Please send proposed titles and abstracts of up to 250 words by October 12th to: Emma Gaalaas Mullaney (egm012@bucknell.edu) and Vanessa Massaro (vam011@bucknell.edu). We will confirm participation by October 17th, with abstracts and AAG registration due on October 29th.