Deadline extension CFP AAG 2016: Transnationalizing Migration Management?   

AAG annual meeting, San Francisco, March 29 – April 2, 2016

Organizers

Malene H. Jacobsen and Leif Johnson (University of Kentucky)

Session Overview

Although international migration by its very nature involves flows across territorial borders, the geographical imagination of migration management remains thoroughly embedded within the nation-state. Building on the recent work of Mountz & Loyd (2014) and Collyer & King (2015), this session asks the question of what it means to theorize migration management through a transnational lens. This session is aimed broadly at scholars interested in spaces of bordering and migration management practices in the context of cross border governance. We invite submissions that explore the spatial aspects of migration management across different scales.

The session seeks to engage in the following questions but is also open to others: How do national/transnational understandings of migration management differ and/or converge? How is the concept of transnationalism related to other concepts in migration studies like the international, (im)mobility, flows, networks, globalization, extraterritoriality, offshoring, assemblage, etc.? To what extent is the transnationalization of migration management a historically novel trend/phenomenon? How is the phenomenon related to changes within the nation-state itself or other forces (market pressures, neoliberalization, etc.)? How can transnational migration management practices/strategies be studied empirically and unpacked conceptually? What kinds of political possibilities does the transnationalization of migration management enable or foreclose?

Possible empirical topics might include:

–          The spatiality of borders and migration management

–          Geographies of the institutions and agencies engaged in transnational migration management

–          The roles of international agencies and humanitarian organizations in controlling/facilitating mobility

–          Cross-border policing and policies

–          Bi- and multilateral agreements between countries

–          Socioeconomic development in border regions

–          The role of development aid in migration management

–          Migration management as an area of expertise, intervention, and specialist domain of knowledge, logics, personnel, methods, and politics

–          The humanitarian-migration management nexus

–          Managerial practices such as refugee resettlement, deterrence, confinement, deportation, and ‘voluntary’ return

Please send abstracts of up to 250 words to Malene H. Jacobsen (malene.jacobsen@uky.edu) and Leif Johnson (leif.johnson@uky.edu) by Thursday, October 22^nd, 2015. Selected abstracts will be accepted by October 24^th. All participants must provide AAG PINs by October 28^th.

Call for session paper AAG 2016 San Francisco (March 29 – April 2)
Promoting soft mobilities : towards more inclusive cities ?
Organizers: France Guérin-Pace (Ined, CIST, Paris) and Paulina Lopez-Gutierrez (University Paris 1, Ined)

Keywords: soft mobilities, urban policies, actorness, inclusive cities, urban inequalities, representations.
The promotion of walking, and of soft mobilities more widely, in contemporary urban public policies is a key objective for developing more sustainable cities.
These policies aim mainly at reducing environmental pollution as part of the effort to limit climate change, but they also have an explicit discourse on access to fairer or more inclusive cities.
What is the reality behind these policies which are taking shape in various urban, socioeconomic, and cultural contexts?
Based on concrete examples, how do these policies participate in the construction of fairer cities or, on the contrary, contribute to the strengthening of inequalities?

These are the questions we shall seek to address in this session by inviting participants to explore this theme from several different angles:

– The discourse of urban policy actors.

Analyzing the broad array of actors involved in the implementation of public policies reveals very different representations of the public place, and multiple issues of power.
We will examine who are the actors involved in implementing urban policies in favor of soft mobilities, how they express themselves in official discourse, and what arguments they employ to promote such mobilities.

– How individual practices are inscribed in space?

Analyzing how these soft mobilities take practical form in the daily practices of the urban space raises questions about the extent to which the actors’ discourse reflects inhabitants real needs.
The way in which soft mobilities are integrated into the fabric of the city can reveal inequalities of access that may strengthen rather that alleviate existing inequalities in terms of transport.
We will also take an interest in the strategies that may be used by individuals to circumvent and overcome various difficulties and constraints (lack of facilities and difficulty
in accessing goods and services, inadequate transport provision, regulations governing usage, etc.).

– The exclusive dimension of soft mobility policies

Despite the objective of making cities more inclusive, we observe that in certain urban contexts the implementation of soft mobility policies involves a form of privatization of public place and results in enhancement
of certain places to the detriment of others, an outcome that runs contrary to the goal of social opening that underpins those policies. The development of urban facilities (pedestrian streets, cycle lanes, etc.)
sometimes competes with previous uses of the urban space that are now considered incompatible. We thus observe that the legitimacy of users is sometimes undermined, on the basis of varied characteristics,
such as gender, age or socioeconomic status, or specific forms of usage such as informal businesses and settlements.

Please send inquiries and abstracts (250 words) before October 28^th to France Guérin-Pace (guerin@ined.fr) and Paulina Lopez-Gutierrez. (pau.lop.gu@gmail.com) with your PIN number.

More information about the AAG conference: http://www.aag.org/annualmeeting

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 Monday, October 19, 2015.

Deadline extended to October 22.

Call for papers for the AAG annual meeting, San Francisco, March 29 – April 2, 2016

Locating Humanitarian Violence: Persistence, Circulation, Emergence.

Organisers: Andrew Merrill, Ben Butler and Killian McCormack (University of Toronto)

Although grounded in an ostensible universal morality and frequently couched in the therapeutic rhetoric of human rights and security, a hierarchy of life underpins humanitarian responses and practices, with different lives and bodies valued over others in a broader regime of biopolitical regulation. Humanitarian violence requires the mobilization and intersection of a variety of knowledges, logics, infrastructures and bodies both beyond and within traditional studies of security and militarism. This session is interested in contemporary perspectives, particularly those informed by feminist, queer and post-colonial scholarships, interrogating the materialities, embodiments, epistemic frames and ideologies that are deployed and circulated in the production of humanitarian violence. We invite papers that challenge the assumptions and presuppositions of humanitarian discourse, and that confront the material and epistemic violence that is obscured through invocations of humanitarianism. Please submit abstracts of no more than 300 words to Andrew Merrill (andrew.merrill@mail.utoronto.ca), Ben Butler (benjamin.butler@mail.utoronto.ca) and Killian McCormack (k.mccormack@mail.utoronto.ca) by October 22, 2015. Notification of acceptance will be sent out the week of October 26, 2015.

Possible paper topics include:

–       Relocating Humanitarian Crises and Militarised Response to the Global North

–       Refugees, Conflict and the Site of Humanitarianism

–       Worlding Humanitarian Violence

–       Natural Disaster, Militarised Response and Displacement

–       Transnational Circulations of Populations and the Logistics of Violence

–       Seeking Humanitarian Response

–       Suffering, Ethics and Humanitarianism

–       Geoeconomics of Humanitarian Response

–       Reconstruction and the Consequences of Humanitarian Violence

–       Humanitarian War and State Racism

–       Defining Humanitarian Crises (e.g., Canadian First Nations Reserves, Racialized Ghettoes)

–       War and Humanitarianism/War as Humanitarian

–       Affect, Humanitarianism and the Suffering Body

–       Settler Colonialism and the Production of the Humanitarian Subject

–       Resisting Militarism and Humanitarian Violence

–       Law and Humanitarianism

Keywords:

• Bodies

• Embodiment

• Militarism

• Materiality

• Humanitarianism

• War

• History

• Reconstruction

• Colonialism

• Race

• Security

• Development

• Affect

• Disaster/Crisis

• Geopolitics

• Geoeconomics

• Queer Theory

• Feminist Theory

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

Interrogating the Anthropocene in the Himalayan Region: Hazards, Infrastructure, and Environmental Justice. 

**This session is part of the Asia Symposium: Highlighting Asian Geographies**  

Organizers:
Mabel Gergan, UNC Chapel Hill

Sponsored by the Polar Geography, Political Geography and Cultural and Ecology speciality groups of the Association of American Geographers (AAG) Annual Meeting, San Francisco, 29th March — 3rd April 2015.

Organisers : 

Michael J Laiho —m.j.laiho@durham.ac.uk

Department of Geography & Durham Energy Institute, Durham University.

Brice Perombelon — brice.perombelon@ouce.ox.ac.uk

School of Geography and the Environment, University of Oxford.

Abstract :

Competition over resources, land and people in the Arctic have recently increased following  the effects of climate change on local, regional and national political systems. Resource multinational corporations, national States as well as regional and local socio-economic actors are now competing for the right to control the access to these ore-rich frozen landscapes. However, this is more than a simple contest for ownership of space. It is indeed the continuation of a historical phenomenon of neo-colonialisation which has seen the North’s indigenous peoples dispossessed of their land in order to facilitate the continuous accumulation of capital in the hands of external actors (Harvey, 2003).

Following this trend, it has been emphasised that Arctic States are now attempting to define the North’s identity solely in terms of potentialities for future economic development (Sejersen, 2015). This simply renders the indigenous interpretation of tradition, of the past as alive and ontologically part of Arctic space, obsolete. This is particularly true with regards to a shared view, among non-indigenous Arctic actors, of nature as subservient to the social world and to its economic and political needs. In practice, this has taken the form of Arctic geopolitical entities such as Canada or the EU actively seeking to claim and govern ‘their’ Arctic space. In order to do so, they have implemented sustainable development policies, which in effect aim to facilitate the exploration and exploitation of Arctic resources.

In line with indigenous interpretations, this project sees Arctic nature as (a) non-human being(s) endowed with multiple agencies and asks, rather provocatively, whether sustainable development in the Arctic is possible? Drawing from an innovative decolonial epistemological stance (Smith, 2012) the organisers of this session call for a collection of papers that can help understand the interplay between the State (and/or States), multinational resource exploitation corporations, indigenous peoples and non-human actors in the shaping, implementation and functioning of these sustainable development strategies and their effects on nature. We hope to better understand the nexus between the political economy, geography and ecology of the Arctic in the context of these co-occuring, sometimes opposing, often dominating material-semiotic systems. The main outcome of this session will be to develop a comprehensive account of power/knowledge dynamics related to environmental change in the Circumpolar North.

Different perceptions of Arctic environment, development and social movements (Peet and Watts 1996) as well as [sic] contextual, conflictual, consensual and messy spatialities of polar geopolitics are all relevant to the session (Powell and Dodds 2014). Theoretical and methodological approaches should therefore elaborate on the multiple epistemological groundings that give rise, in a post-colonial context, to various practices of governance via strategies of territorialisation and subjectivation (Elden, 2013; Foucault, 1980, 1993; Coulthard, 2014). We are particularly interested in the process that give rise to human and non-human materialities that inscribe the phenomenological development of resource frontiers in the historical emergence of State/corporate behaviour towards nature and Arctic space and place (Nuttall, 2010; Bridge and Le Billion, 2013; Bridge, 2009; Steinberg, 1995; Cronon, 1995; Mitchell, 2011).

Questions exploring Arctic space and place include but are not limited to the following :

• 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?

Please send all abstracts (including your name, affiliation and registration code) to session organisers by the 21st October 2015. For more information on the requirements of the AAG see: http://www.aag.org/cs/annualmeeting/call_for_papers

References :  

Bridge, G. and Le Billon, P. (2013) Oil. Cambridge: Polity Press.

Bridge, G. (2009) ‘Material Worlds: Natural Resources, Resource Geography and the Material Economy.’ Geography Compass 3 (3) 1217-1244.

Coulthard, S.G. (2014). Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition. Minneapolis. London: University of Minnesota Press.

Cronon, W. (1995) Uncommon Ground: Toward Reinventing Nature. New York: W. W. Norton and Co.

Elden, S. (2013) The Birth of Territory. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press.

Foucault, M. (1993). ‘About the Beginning of the Hermeneutics of the Self: Two Lectures at Dartmouth.’ Political Theory 21 (2) 198-227.

Foucault, M. (1980) Power/Knowledge: selected interviews and other writings. London: The Harvester Press.

Harvey, D. (2003). The New Imperialism. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Mitchell, T. (2011) Carbon Democracy. London and New York: Verso.

Nuttall, M. (2010) Pipeline Dreams: people, environment, and the Arctic energy frontier. Copenhagen: IWGIA.

Peet, R. and Watts, M. J. (1996) Liberation ecologies: environment, development, social movements. London: Routledge.

Powell, R. and Dodds, K. (2014) Polar Geography? Knowledges, resources and legal regimes. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar Publishing.

Sejersen, F. (2015) Future-makers in the Arctic. A critical view on globalisation, urbanisation and change. Keynote, Aalborg, August 12-15, 2015 at Postgraduate summer school “Change and Continuation in the Arctic,” University of Aalborg.

Steinberg, P. E. (2001) The Social Construction of Oceans. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Smith, L.T. (2012). Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples. 2nd Edition. London: Zed Books.

Small-Scale and Urban Mining: The Shadow Circuits and Afterlives of Minerals

Call for Papers – Association of American Geographers Annual Meeting

San Francisco, March 29 – April 2, 2016

Organizers:

Cynthia Morinville: Department of Geography and Planning, University of Toronto

Andrea Marston: Geography Department, UC Berkeley

Discussants:

Nancy Lee Peluso: Department of Environment, Science, Policy, and Management, UC Berkeley

Rajyashree Narayanareddy: Department of Geography and Planning, University of Toronto

Mineral extraction, consumption, and disposal are often understood as a unidirectional “chain” leading from the open pit mine to the urban landfill. While such a linear lens can be illuminating when trained on the movement of global capital, it can also obscure the practices that emerge in its shadows – practices that in many ways enable and sustain the primary commodity chain. More specifically, it can obscure “artisanal and small-scale mining” operations (ASM), which are becoming increasingly widespread in countries as diverse as Ghana, Brazil, China, and Indonesia (Tschakert 2009; Veiga and Hinton 2002; Shen and Gunson 2006; Peluso 2015), and the more recently emerging growth of “urban mining,” or the manual search for recyclable metals in electronic waste in countries such as Ghana, Nigeria, South Africa, China and India (Lepawsky and McNabb 2010). The number of people involved in both of these livelihood strategies is growing in tandem with the global informalization of labor, the (now flagging) commodity boom, the technification of industrial mining, and ongoing urbanization.

Despite increasing academic interest in small-scale mining, urban mining, and “informal economies” writ large, these practices are usually examined in isolation both from one another and from formal/large-scale economic processes. Such a conceptual framing encourages the reduction of both processes to matters of technological or regulatory debate, with academics and policymakers arrayed along a spectrum that includes those who cautiously celebrate small-scale and urban mining as entrepreneurial or potentially empowering (Oteng-Ababio 2012; Hinton et al. 2003; Noetstaller 1987), those who primarily critique appalling labor conditions and environmental contamination (Williams 2011; Williams et al. 2008; Pucket and Smith 2002; Osibanjo and Nnorom 2007), and those who seek to make these shadow circuits “productive” by encouraging alliances between small-scale and large-scale operators (Reddy 2015).

We will be hosting 1-2 paper sessions that explore some of these shadow circuits and afterlives of mineral (re)extraction. We invite critical approaches to small-scale, urban, and/or informal aspects of mineral extraction taking place in post-closure mines, e-waste sites and landfills, and other shadow spaces of extraction. Particularly compelling would be work that seeks to understand these shadow circuits in relation to metatheories of extraction, production, and consumption – and in relation to one another. Potential paper topics include (but are not limited to):

• Reconceptualizations of small-scale, artisanal, informal and/or urban mining

• Beyond commodity chains: circular economies, cradle to cradle, metabolic flows, etc.

• Small-scale/urban mining relations with large-scale/private/state entities

• Role of development agencies in shaping shadow circuits

• New materialist approaches to metals and minerals

• Forms of expertise (e.g. “appropriate technology,” participatory monitoring programs, etc.)

• Small-scale/urban mining in relation to race, indigeneity, and/or ethnicity

• Post-closure mine politics/the afterlives of mines and metals

• Mines and e-waste sites as ruins

• Discard studies, waste as resources

• Labour politics: precarity, informality, social organization, etc.

• Environmental and social justice

• Post/de-colonial perspectives

Please send abstracts to Cynthia Morinville (cynthia.morinville@mail.utoronto.ca) and Andrea Marston (ajmarston@berkeley.edu) by October 16, 2016.

CFP San Francisco AAG: Transformations of property and land in the contemporary political economy.

Organizers: James DeFilippis, Joseph Pierce, and Deborah Martin

Land and, its politically constructed form, property, have always been central components of the capitalist political economy. While historically this was predominantly in the form of being a “factor of production” that role has been joined in the last few decades by land being a financialized asset. But the meanings, nature, and character of land and property have always been constructed, and such constructions, while sometimes seeming permanent, have always been contested.

In this session we will be exploring the ways in which alternative and oppositional forms of land and property are being constructed in the contemporary political economy. Such transformations of land and property are an ongoing endeavor and their political implications and meanings are themselves unfixed and dynamic. Papers exploring these issues could focus on issues in the United States, about:

• Squatting
• Community Land Trusts
• Limited-equity cooperatives and other forms of shared equity housing
• Rural land reform movements
• The “commons” in our time
• Political contestations in and to property or land “regularization”

Please send proposed paper titles and abstracts (250 words or fewer) to demartin@clarku.edu by Oct 24, 2015.

​We’d love a couple more papers to fill these sessions! Deadline can be extended to Friday 17 October!

AAG 2016 // 29 March – 2 April 2016, San Francisco, CA

Second CFP: Uncertain futures and everyday hedging

In her prophetic novel, The Almanac of the Dead, Leslie Marmon Silko depicts the dystopic future visions of a super-elite, who plan to de-camp earth for socially purified satellite space colonies. She writes

Lazily orbiting in the glass and steel cocoons of these elaborate “biospheres,” the rich need not fear the rabble while they enjoyed their “natural settings” complete with freshwater pools and jungles filled with rare parrots and orchids…At the end the last of the clean water and the uncontaminated soil, the last healthy animals and plants, would be removed from the earth to the orbiting biospheres to “protect” them from the pollution on earth.

                                                                  (Silko, 1991: 728)

Set across the Americas, the sprawling de-colonial novel explores the various ways in which differently situated actors respond to a future they imagine suffused with violence and looming with social, environmental, spiritual and economic catastrophe. Back on earth, visions of the <future uncertain> likewise produce divergent modes of assessing, negotiating and coming to terms with risk—from financialization, to planning for resilience, to shifting the burden down the line through produced forms of hyper-vulnerability.

In this set of sessions, we seek papers that address the everyday hedging and imaginaries of stochastic risk and uncertainty that shape living and livelihoods all over the world (Zeiderman et al 2015). While knowledge about sociality, the changing climate and the world in general expands logarithmically as a result of technological innovations that produce ‘big data,’ whole “regions of experience” are left out—not only unknown, but fundamentally indecipherable (Simone, 2015). How do the varying techniques of knowing and coming to terms with uncertainty and the future—the gut feeling, modeling, faith, financialization—come together and get negotiated in different contexts across the globe? What modes of movement and circulation do they provoke, in both rural and urban settings? How is the unknowable seized or put to use for the opportunities that are exposed in the gaps between differing ways of understanding, anticipating and responding to risk?

We invite papers that take up questions related to the future, uncertainty and risk. These might include:

• Sociality of risk spreading
• Movement and circulation around the city, or across borders/oceans
• Experimental sociality
• The uneven impacts of managing for or experiencing uncertainty
• The spatialization of risk
• Everyday financialization and optionality
• Spatial and scalar effects of various forms of hedging
• Access to hedging
• Differential interpretations of future uncertainty and risk
• Produced precarity

In broadly considering these terms, we hope to draw distinct forms of thinking about the uncertain future into conversation across conventional analytical boundaries—i.e. those distinguishing the urban from the rural, the everyday from the global, science from sociality—while still attending to the specificities of each. Papers will be grouped according to commonalities, the paper sessions will be followed by a panel discussion which will seek to draw out lines of connection, synthesis and dissonance among the disparate work.

We strongly encourage scholars working in/on (cities in) Africa, Latin America, Asia and the Pacific to consider submitting.

Session Organizers    

Léonie Newhouse (Max Plank Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity)

Jamie Shinn (Geography, Texas A& M University)

Confirmed Discussants

AbdouMaliq Simone (MPI MMG/ African Centre for Cities/Goldsmiths/ Rujak Center for Urban Studies)

Alex Schafran (Leeds University)

Specialty Group Sponsorships:

Cultural and Political Ecology Specialty Group

For those interested in presenting a paper, please send along the following to newhouse@mmg.mpg.de andjamieshinn@tamu.edu by 17 October:

• Name, affiliation
• Paper abstract (250 word max)
• Brief bio-sketch (250 word max)

A decision will be communicated by 20 October, and selected participants should ensure that they have registered for the conference (which requires paying the fee) and submitted their abstracts by the general conference deadline 29 October. Full papers will be circulated a month prior to the conference to encourage productive dialogue among and between participants and to give the discussants sufficient time to consider the papers.