Call For Papers
AAG 2017 Boston (April 5-8, 2017)
Session title: Critical geographies of policing and law enforcement
The public protests and debates about police conduct in the US highlight the salience of policing to everyday life for many people within particular places while also forcing a recognition of the relative paucity of geographic scholarship on the same. This is a missed opportunity given that the aims of policing are highly contextual (involving the daily management of people in specific places) and that the techniques of policing are highly geographic (such as limiting the movement of people, setting checkpoints, or detaining lawbreakers). Although geographers have explored some of these issues before, these efforts have not yet yielded a tradition of sustained interest in policing itself within geography. This has left geography in the unenviable position of having little to contribute to the current debates on a self-evidently geographic topic.
This session aims to lay the groundwork for more sustained geographic inquiry on policing by bringing together scholarship that addresses the many interrelated issues about law enforcement that have become so central to contemporary political life. The session welcomes contributions that are either theoretical or empirical (or both).
Possible topics include (but are not limited to) geographic perspectives on:
- Theorizing policing for geographic inquiry
- Interconnections between policing and the state
- Territorial tactics of law enforcement
- Place, policing, and race, class, gender, or other identities
- Police militarization
- Police-related violence (by police or against police)
- Spatialities of anti-police protests
- Police-community engagements
- Police privatization and neoliberal impacts on law enforcement
- Policing and urban gentrification
Please send paper titles and abstracts (250 words) or expressions of interest to Steven Radil (sradil@uidaho.edu) before October 15.