Call For Papers
AAG 2017 Boston (April 5-8, 2017)

Session title: Experiments in Force II: Science and the Apparatus of Warfare

Recent work in geography has not only attempted to identify and describe the networks, norms, agendas, spaces and actors that constitute environments of security, but has also identified how manifold notions of security co-exist, compete and shift over time and from place to place.  The roles that science and technology adopt in the realm of security present extensive areas for study: how, when and by whom is science used to justify, legitimize and procure security initiatives? How are science and technology used to create ‘solutions’ to security problems, and how and when do they lead to security problems themselves? How are ethical concerns balanced with national security, and what constitutes legitimate regulation of norms? Are norms changing? This panel builds on UCL’s Global Governance Institute’s (http://www.ucl.ac.uk/global-governance/) two-day international conference on the interdisciplinary theme of science, technology and security held on 20-21 June 2016. In this paper session we seek to further delve into these questions, looking in particular at the geopolitics of technology and security assemblage.

Sample subject areas include:

• Chemical, Biological, Radiological or Nuclear (CBRN) issues
• Cybersecurity and the ‘internet of things’
• Drones and surveillance
• Weapons proliferation and arms control
• Regulating risky and emerging technologies
• The role of (gendered/raced/differentiated) human bodies in security assemblages

Full abstracts of no more than 250 words should be submitted by 30th September to the session organisers Jason Dittmer j.dittmer@ucl.ac.uk and Anna Feigenbaum afeigenbaum@bournemouth.ac.uk

Call For Papers
AAG 2017 Boston (April 5-8, 2017)

Session title: Experiments in Force I: Science and the Apparatus of Warfare

Recent developments in the means and techniques of warfare have raised questions anew about the spatial delimitation of the battlefield, the legal and ethical norms about killing, and the migration of military technologies to other spheres of security practice. In response, scholars from a variety of disciplines have worked to make sense of these changing geographies of war and violence through scholarship on weapons systems, algorithmic surveillance, special operations, and logistics and infrastructure. Within this work, one approach has been to explore warfare as a set of interrelated processes and has emphasized the longer genealogies and historical geographies of the technologies and materialities of these practices (Kim 2016, Gordillo 2014, Chamayou 2015, Salter 2015, 2016). Less attention, however, has been devoted to historical role of science, and particularly scientific experimentation and testing, in designing, using and managing the scope and consequences of these war technologies and practices over time (c.f. De Landa 1991, Bousquet 2009, Howell 2011, Johnson 2015).

Drawing on a tradition of viewing science as a political practice (Latour 1987, Schaffer and Shapin 1985, Daston and Galison 2010), this panel will recast recent attention to the ‘apparatus’ of war – the collection of actors, objects, practices and discourses through which violent action is constituted (Gregory 2011, Bolton 2015). Focusing on the role of experimental practice in the evolution of the fields – spaces and objectives – of battle, the objective is to consider the consequences not only for means and mechanisms that become possible, but also permissible. The focus is therefore to examine the settings in which techniques and technologies are tested out and in time become standardized, such that the violence of war becomes rational, legal and ethical. We are especially interested in papers, both historical and contemporary in scope, related to (but not excluded to) the changing targets and targeting of killing, the intersection of the spaces of science and war (such as laboratories, testing grounds and military industries), the historical and recent geographies of cyberspace and cyberwarfare, the intersection between medicine and military practice, and the epistemological frameworks underpinning practices of science and warfare.

Please send abstracts (250 words) and/or questions to Katharine Kindervater (katharine.h.kindervater@dartmouth.edu) and Nisha Shah (nisha.shah@uottawa.ca) by October 1, 2016

Call For Papers
AAG 2017 Boston (April 5-8, 2017)

Session title: (Extra)territoriality: re-examining territorial control within and beyond state borders

Organizers:

Sara Hughes, UCLA

Josh Watkins, UC Davis
From deterritorialization to reterritorialization, the linkages between territory, sovereignty, borders, and mobilities are constantly being challenged, reproduced, and reinforced, both conceptually and practically. As territorial control and state power continue to be asserted beyond nation-states’ formal borders, and bordering practices manifest in increasingly complex ways and divergent spaces, it is essential political geographers continue to engage with, re-conceptualize, and empirically verify theories of territoriality–the attempt to control people, phenomena, and relationships by delimiting, asserting control over, and otherwise producing  geographic areas. The aim of this session is to critically examine territoriality within and beyond state borders, particularly how territorial control and the power to (re)produce space/place operates and is situated in diverse geopolitical contexts, across a variety of socio-spatial scales and temporalities. The session seeks to explore and shed light upon the factors, means, and outcomes of manifesting territorialities across space through a full range of theoretical and methodological approaches.

Papers may focus on, but are not limited to:

• Borders, mobility, and territorial control problematizing the Westphalian imaginary and/or across a variety of socio-spatial scales and temporalities
• Territoriality, power, and governance
• Geopolitical representations and culture
• Militarization, dispossession, settler colonialism, and the space of occupation
• Blurred distinctions between spaces of war/peace, foreign/domestic, enemy/civilian
• Geographies of law and law enforcement
• Everyday dimensions of territorial policing, securitization, surveillance, and violence
• Comparative studies or studies in under-researched geographic/historical areas

This session is sponsored by the Political Geography and Cultural Geography Speciality Groups.

Please send proposed titles and abstracts of no more than 200 words by email to Sara Hughes (saranhughes@ucla.edu) by Friday, 14 October 2016.

Call For Papers
AAG 2017 Boston (April 5-8, 2017)

Session title: Practices of Decolonization and Racial Justice in Geography

Session convenors: Amber Murrey (Clark University), Patricia Daley (University of Oxford), and Yonique Campbell (The University of the West Indies, Mona Campus)

During the early years of the 21^st Century, we have witnessed powerful reassertions of the continuing political, social, and economic relevance of decolonizing projects within the university. Working within many intellectual paradigms (subaltern studies, area studies, feminist and anti-racist politicalecology, decolonial studies, critical race studies, anarchist thought), decolonizing scholars have advanced innovative projects to undermine privilege and power within institutions of higher learning. These efforts have included the bolstering of a sundry and powerful literature articulating critiques of racial, gender, andgeographical inequalities and their reverberations and influences within university spaces. These dialogues confront deeply rooted, complex, and multidimensional power structures that continue to effect and enforce long-standing colonial inequalities. There is a well-developed and self-critical scholarship withingeography that has called out the discipline’s whiteness (in our classrooms, in our curriculums, and in our reference lists), the discipline’s privileging of Anglophone voices and places, the discipline’s role in advancing colonial projects, and the discipline’s hetero-normative methodological orientations. Race and colonialism have been urgently re-centered in today’s universities. This re-centering is made all the more acute by the charged global atmosphere created by the US Presidential Election, by rising anti-Black and anti-Muslim rhetoric and violence across North America and Western Europe, by demands to confront long-standing racial injustices within policing practices, by the racialized effects of global climate change, and by growing global economic inequalities.

At the same time, powerful student movements and activist-intellectual projects—from #RhodesMustFall to #whyismycurriculumsowhite to #CadaanStudies to “I, Too, Am Harvard” to #BlackLivesMatter to #FeesMustFall—have demanded that university administration and faculty account for the entanglements and engagements of the university with(in) historical and contemporary forms of oppression (both on and off campus). Indeed, universities have long been spaces wherein larger social changes reverberate profoundly: spaces of resistance and struggle as well as oppression and suppression.

We have seen this again throughout more than 18-months of sustained #Oromo student struggles across the Oromo region of Ethiopia, where hundreds of student activists have been shot at, beaten, and disappeared, where Internet connectivity has been reduced, and where campuses have been occupied by military police officers. We have seen this again through the violent police crackdown on protestors at the University of Nairobi, which resulted in the indefinite closing of the institution. We have seen this again in campuses across the US and the UK, where students have disrupted sporting events and held die-ins and lie-ins to bring attention to racial inequalities within their campuses and communities, s but are met with opposition and condemnation. Again, as we drafted this CfP, news was breaking that police fired teargas and shot rubber bullets at students (protesting increased tuition fees) at the University of KwaZulu-Natal’s Howard campus.

Call for Abstracts

For this AAG panel session, we invite activists, scholars, artists, and decolonizers to participate in dialogue on these and other efforts underway to decolonize in the university. We are excited by the prospect of creating meaningful conversations across paradigms and between traditions of knowledge, so that scholars advocating and practicing slow scholarship against/within neoliberalized/managerialized academic cultures connect, for example, with anti-racist scholars… or so that anti-racist slow scholars engage with anarchist feminist pedagogists and Pan-African political ecologists, and so on. Bringing together people who are actively involved in efforts to decolonize the university and the discipline of geography, we will reflect on (collective experiences of) decolonization as a critical practice. At the same time, we have witnessed co-optations of calls to “decolonize the university” within hegemonic institutional frames, laid out, as these calls have been, through normative and established hierarchies of place and knowledge within our unequal and still-colonized global higher education landscape. We will be attentive to such efforts to mainstream or instrumentalize intellectual decolonization(s) and calls for racial justice.

Towards these ends, we invite outlines of potential discussions (200 words) that address these and other related issues. Possible topics include:

• Creating and sustaining collaborative decolonizing academic cultures
• The role of scholars in decolonizing and/or colonizing projects
• Enactions and/or experimentations of pedagogical, curriculum, and classroom decolonization(s)
• Contemporary student movements and (re)configurations of power within university spaces
• Instrumentalization(s) of anti-racist or anti-colonial knowledge projects by hegemonic actors
• Racial justice, racial inequalities, and the discipline of geography (or the social sciences)
• Place-based reflections on the politics of appeals to “decolonize knowledge,” to “decolonize the university,” and/or to “decolonizegeography”
• Engagements with academic exclusions and punishment(s) within university spaces

Contacts

If you would like to participate in this conversation, please send an outline of your ideas (200 words) to Patricia Daley (patricia.daley@geog.ox.ac.uk), Yonique Campbell (yonique.campbell02@uwimona.edu.jm), and Amber Murrey (amurrey@clarku.edu) by Friday October 7^th, 2016. We look forward to connecting with you.

Call For Papers
AAG 2017 Boston (April 5-8, 2017)

Session title: Future Technologies, Future Geographies

The beginning premise of this session is that humanity is on a trajectory of rapidly accelerating technological progression that will fundamentally change our world in the not too distant future. Yet, while there is much evidence for such a trajectory, geographers have shied away from engaging its geographical implications. This is odd. Whereas geographers are willing to hypothesize the possible future outcomes of rising global temperatures, they seem reluctant to think through the possible consequences of emergent technologies. One indication of this reluctance is the almost complete absence of transhumanism within any academic geographical discussions. This session seeks to establish a forum for geographers interested in thinking through some of the many possible humangeographical implications of future technologies.

For the purposes of this session, there is no clear boundary for what is considered a future technology, but generally the term refers to technologies that have not yet become fully implemented or marketed. Some future technologies that appear to be just on the horizon include autonomous robots/vehicles, nanotechnology, 3-D printing, and ubiquitous computing. Further off technologies that are still in the exploratory realm include radical life extension, advanced artificial intelligence (AI), nuclear fusion energy, and molecular manufacturing.  This session is open to constructive geographical engagements with any future technologies. Papers are particularly encouraged that point to specific ways that current political-economic-social structures will be challenged and potentially rethought via these future technologies.

Possible questions to be addressed include:

• What impact will autonomous vehicles have on city planning? On transportation infrastructure?
• What are the implications of autonomous vehicles/robots and AI for thegeography of labor?
• What will some of the economic geographic consequences be of 3-D printing, nanotechnology, ubiquitous computing?
• Will economic globalization be threatened or strengthened by future technologies?
• What are the implications of these technologies for the developing world?
• Will the geography of raw material acquisition change with the advent of new forms of manufacturing?
• Will advanced AI lead to a decentralization of the service sector?
• Could manufacturing and services be de-commoditized through future technology shareware? What would the geography of that look like?
• What are the geographic consequences of a future economy that is run autonomously?
• Will cryptocurrencies come to impact the geography of money?
• What will the future geography of energy look like?
• Can future technologies lead to the fracturing of scalar power dynamics, i.e. a diminishing of corporate and state power in favor of increased local and regional power?
• Would an increasingly decentralized economy brought about by future technologies bring about changes in political boundaries?
• What are some of the possible demographic consequences of radically extended life?
• What would the geography of access to life extension technology look like?
• What are some geographical dimensions to transhumanism?

*** Please send an abstract, with contact information, to Hannes Gerhardt (hgerhard@westga.edu) by October 20, 2016. 

This session is organized by Hannes Gerhardt (Associate Professor at University of West Georgia)

Call For Papers
AAG 2017 Boston (April 5-8, 2017)

Session title: Critical Worldbuilding: Toward a Geographical Engagement with Speculative Fiction

Session Organizers: Jeffrey Martin (University of California, Berkeley) and Gretchen Sneegas (University of Georgia)

“Worldbuilding” – the construction of imaginary worlds – has long been a staple of speculative and visionary fiction. Today, the creation of alternate science fiction and fantasy universes – often with their own maps, histories, ecologies, cultures, and social structures – increasingly contributes to popular culture and big business. From novels to movies to games, from alternate versions of the “real world” (Marvel’s many properties, True Blood, Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle) to the more alien and bizarre (the many settings of Dungeons and Dragons, James Cameron’s Avatar, China Miéville’s Bas-Lag), these worlds represent an important and under-considered object of study and intervention for critical geographers.

While speculative fiction has long been examined as a lens through which to view the world – as it was, is, or could be – we contend that geography and critical social science have been under-involved in the creation, analysis, and struggles over fictional worlds. Worldbuilding is a fundamentally geographical exercise and an unavoidably political act (even if not recognized as such) – ideas, concerns, and controversies in the “real world” are embedded and reproduced through fictional worlds, and the production and consumption of these worlds informs and is informed by contemporary debates.

In this call for papers, we ask: How might critical social science and geographicaltools help us understand and engage with speculative fiction? How might criticalgeography inform the creation of “better” fictional worlds, and to what end(s)? What can fictional worlds tell us about our “real” world? How might speculative fiction contribute to geographical and social science theory and method, in a similar manner to the history of dialogue between science fiction and technological practice?

We seek a selection of papers and other contributions (see below) representing the breadth of the geographic discipline, across such themes and sub-disciplines as earth sciences, political economy, discursive representation, race, gender, technology, ecology, social relations, ideological reproductions, cartography, and more. Possible topics include, but are in no way limited to:

• Critical race theory and the construction of the other/alien;
• Landscape as character, the co-production of social and physical landscapes;
• The durability of environmental determinism and other debunked narratives in fiction;
• Colonialism and the frontier, progress narratives and modernization;
• Cartography and the representation of fictional/speculative worlds;
• Political economy’s presence and absence across worlds, and the naturalization of capitalism;
• “Blindspots”/erasures in historical fiction, “reading back” modern norms;
• Tropes, “resonance”, and challenging “realism” in speculative fiction (see esp. gender, sexism);
• Nature and environmentalism;
• Present and near-future u/dystopias

**We also welcome submissions representing less “traditional” forms of analytical scholarly work. Such submissions may include short works of fiction, graphic novels/comics, poetry, video shorts, maps, and other forms of representation showcasing our own worldbuilding geographic expression.**

Bringing together a diverse group of theoretical orientations, we hope this session will contribute critical insights to ongoing discussions on the interrelation between art and politics, the “real world” and the many worlds of our imaginations.

Please send an abstract of no more than 250 words by 5 p.m., October 15 to: Jeff Martin (j.vance.martin [at] berkeley [dot] edu) and Gretchen Sneegas (gsneegas [at] uga [dot] edu).