Pedagogies of Race and Racialization

AAG 2018 Panel

Organizers:

Brian Jordan Jefferson, University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign

Jennifer Tucker, University of New Mexico

Our age of resurgent white supremacy requires critical pedagogies of race and racialization. As educators, we are positioned to shape the horizon of the politically possible through engaging students. Yet teaching race is tricky. Miseducation in US K-12 classrooms is commonplace, and some students arrive without basic historical knowledge of racial capitalism, forged in the crucible of slavery and theft of Native lands, and persistent in new forms today. The complexity of racialization requires moving beyond the common binary of black and white to include the diverse experiences of other racialized groups, while still recognizing anti-blackness and settler colonialism as core dynamics of US exceptionalism. There are also pragmatic challenges. Students arrive with vastly different lived experiences of race and racialization. White students, or others with racial privilege, may resist learning about whiteness, or other means of turning toward practices of power and privilege. Educators can expect microagressions in the classroom, even as institutional support to gain competency in navigating racially diverse classrooms is often inadequate. Instructors of color and women may experience more push back when teaching critical perspectives on race than white educators and men.

Despite the challenges, teaching race provides a vital frame for students to see the linkages between critical theoretical frameworks–adequate to the complexity of the concrete–and effective, justice oriented action, that is, to engage with praxis. By rooting race and racialization in specific spaces, with deep histories, geography offers an important set of theoretical resources to help students grasp the processes, stakes and political possibilities of our current moment. Indeed, teaching about racialized space–borders, prisons, sacrifice zones, immigrant detention camps, the plantation, suburban enclaves, ghettos, and slums, to name a few—provides important resources to ground theory and engage students.

This panel will discuss coping devices, knowledge production politics, pedagogical practices, and possible forms of academic resistance. We will also discuss real-world instances in which academic freedom was deprived, and how these instances affect teaching race in geography.

If interested, please send a brief description of your proposed contribution to this panel by October 15 to Brian and Jennifer at bjjeffer@illinois.edu and jennifertucker@unm.edu

CFP: Network analysis and geography

Association of American Geographers Conference, New Orleans, USA, 10-14 April 2018

Walter J. Nicholls                                   Justus Uitermark                                  Michiel van Meeteren

Department of Urban Planning          Department of Sociology                    Cosmopolis, Department of Geography

and Public Policy

University of California, Irvine           University of Amsterdam                    Vrije Universiteit Brusse

wnicholl@uci.edu                                  justusuitermark@hotmail.com          michiel.van.meeteren@vub.be

Geographers have conceived of networks as a foundational spatial concept (e.g. Jessop et al 2008; Leitner et al 2008). In spite of this recognition, the adoption of network analysis within contemporary geography has been varied across geographical subdisciplines. This session departs from the conviction that network analysis heralds considerable promise to develop theoretical notions as well as methods that allow us to better understand how spaces are constituted and contested. This session therefore explores the potentials and limitations of network analysis for human geography.

Demonstrating the relevance of networks as theoretical constructs, scholars like Michael Mann (1986) and Manuel Castells (1996, 2009) have shown how networks of various kinds are constitutive of social power. Networks of people, corporations, and government officials agglomerate in specific locations, with some agglomerations concentrating more resources and power than others.

Network analysis further provides a rich array of techniques and methods that can capture relations in places and across space. Despite the early adoption of network-analytical techniques by both physical and human geographers during the heyday of the spatial science era (e.g. Haggett and Chorley, 1969), contemporary geographers only make limited use of such technological affordances, with notable exceptions of research on city networks (e.g. Taylor and Derudder, 2016) and digital geographies (Crampton et al. 2013).  The growing availability of digital data and the development of advanced techniques for network analysis provide many new opportunities for geography while also raising new issues with respect to research ethics and data validity.

Lastly, network analysis can facilitate conversation across disciplines and subdisciplines. Network analysis provides theoretical notions and techniques that can be used to capture phenomena ranging from social movements and corporate networks to the diffusion of innovation or road infrastructures. Because it provides a common vocabulary, network analysis has the potential to highlight patterns and mechanisms that operate across different fields. While the reduction of complex social relations to a standardized vocabulary offers exciting opportunities, the imposition of network categories can also result in theoretical and political blinders.

The session aims to encourage and inspire scholars to theoretically, methodologically, and empirically explore the potentials and limitations of network analysis for geography. We invite papers from various geographical specializations (e.g. economic, political, social, cultural, transportation, physical and environmental geography) to compare network approaches and build a more comprehensive and dynamic theory of networked geographies.

We particularly welcome contributions that focus on:

–        networks as building blocks of place, territory, scale

–        networks and power

–        the geographical unevenness of network structures

–        the sources of cooperation and conflict within networks

–        the interconnection of networks across domains (e.g. economic, political, environmental and cultural)

–        digital data

–        qualitative and quantitative methods to measure networked geographies

Please submit abstracts of no more than 250 words, names, affiliations and contact information to justusuitermark@hotmail.com, wnicholl@uci.edu and michiel.van.meeteren@vub.be by October 14, 2017 at the latest.

Region as Method

This is a joint plenary session from various specialty groups. scholars from all regional and thematic foci are invited:

Cold War era area studies and traditional regional geography were presented by their proponents as integrative fields – approaches to coalesce macro and micro level analyses of geo-strategic motives, social processes, and political and economic dynamics. In the 1990s, a reiteration of regional geography under the label of New Regionalism (Storper 1997) explored economic processes at the local level, yet maintaining a keen attention to multilevel and comparative sociopolitical dimensions. Since then, the predominance of thematic foci in the discipline – such as political geography writ large, and strands of economic geography such as global value chains and production networks created topical, theoretical, and in some cases methodological division between state-centered analyses in political geography and firms-centered analyses in economic geography. Notwithstanding the claims of geoeconomics to account for the role of the market in larger political decisions, and GVC and GPN roles of the state in governance, it is difficult to account for the liminal spaces in which firms and states actually interact, and, consequently, for the ways in which the increasingly transnational life of firms influences changes in the structure of states.

This session invites reflections on how regional analyses may be able to carry forward more nuanced analyses of the processes tying together firms and states. These include, but are not limited to, new forms of sovereignty and territoriality aimed at regulating but also supporting firms within as well as without borders.

• We welcome regionally focused contributions from economic, political, and cultural geographers that include, but are not limited to:
• Theoretical reflections on the notion of region within geo-economic imaginaries that privilege metaphors of flows over viewing states as static frames;
• The interactions between states sponsored investment promotion practices and firms’ locational choices;
• Commercial and business diplomacy;
• Questioning of the organizational boundaries between states and firms through public-private partnerships and other means;
• Theoretical discussions of the role of states in value chains and production networks, as well as the role of firms in geo-economics;
• Empirical studies of how transnational firms (both large multinationals and small transnational or diaspora businesses), governments, and civil societies communicate their reciprocal interests and mediate conflicts;

Depending on the quality of the papers and inclinations of the participants we will submit a special journal issue proposal. Accordingly, please plan to submit a paper at an advanced draft level.

Please send your abstracts to Christian Sellar csellar@olemiss.edu or Jeremy Tasch jtasch@towson.edu

Call for Papers: “Anxious/Desiring geographies.”
Organizers: Jeremy W. Crampton (Kentucky, USA), Nick Robinson (RHUL, UK), Mikko Joronen (Tampere, Finland)

At this political moment we seem beset by anxieties from every direction. Automation is identified as an existential threat to jobs. Vulnerabilities from political violence increase anxieties of the subaltern. Climate change and the inauguration of the Anthropocene threaten our wellbeing. Nast (2017) credits the financial crisis with being “psychically traumatic.”
At least since Gregory’s identification of the inadequacy of representation, which he dubbed “cartographic anxiety” (Gregory, 1994), geographers have meaningfully contributed to understandings of the affective politics of anxiety. Attention has been paid to a geopolitics of fear that is experienced on both an everyday and global level (Pain and Smith, 2008), and to sexual desires and identities (Bell and Valentine, 1995). Brown and Knopp (2016) have identified a biopolitics of the state’s anxieties in the governance of the gay bar.
In this session we seek papers that deepen our geographical understandings of anxiety, desire and/or the possible relationship(s) between them.
Is anxiety a mental disease that can be diagnosed and treated (APA, 2013), founded on lack, or can it be deployed more positively (Robbins and Moore, 2012)? Is anxiety the only affect that does not deceive (Lacan, 2014)? What is the relation between anxiety, desire and place? What might a politics of locationally affective resistance look like (Griffiths, 2017)? How is desire productive of spaces? How do anxiety and desire circulate and relate to subjectivities and the material body? Are there particular places and spaces that are invested in anxiety or desire, and what is the lived experience there?

Topics that address these questions include but are not limited to:
• Places of anxiety and desire
• Surveillance anxiety (eg., geosurveillance, automated facial recognition)
• Automation anxiety and desires
• The affective politics of policing
• Living in code/space & the smart city and becoming the data subject
• Everyday anxieties
• The biopolitics of anxiety and desire
• The anxious/desiring/desired body
• Affective resistances
• Governing through desire
• Anxieties from political violence
• Affective relations of anxiety/desire to pain, grief, worry or fear

Please send a title and abstract of 250 words to jcrampton@uky.edu, nicholas.Robinson.2014@live.rhul.ac.uk, and Mikko Joronen mikko.joronen@uta.fi by October 15th.

References

American Psychiatric Association. 2013 Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition (DSM-5). Arlington, VA: American Psychiatric Association.

Bell, D. and Valentine, G. Mapping Desire: Geographies of Sexualities. London: Routledge.

Brown, M. & L. Knopp. 2016. Sex, drink, and state anxieties: governance through the gay bar. Social & Cultural Geography, 17, pp. 335-358.

Gregory, D. 1994. Geographical Imaginations. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell.

Griffiths, M. (2017) Hope in Hebron: The political affects of activism in a strangled city. Antipode, 49, 617-635.

Lacan, J. 2014. Anxiety. Seminar Book X. Cambridge: Polity Press.

Nast, H. J. (2017) Into the arms of dolls: Japan’s declining fertility rates, the 1990s financial crisis and the (maternal) comforts of the posthuman. Social & Cultural Geography, 18, 758-785.

Pain, R. and Smith, S. (Eds) 2008. Fear: Critical Geopolitics and Everyday Life. Aldershot: Ashgate.

Robbins, P. and Moore, S.A. 2012. Ecological anxiety disorder: diagnosing the politics of the Anthropocene. cultural geographies, 20(1) 3–19.

Sioh, M. 2014. A small narrow space: postcolonial territorialization and the libidinal economy. In P. Kingsbury and S. Pile (Eds), Psychoanalytic Geographies. Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate.

CALL FOR PAPERS

Geographies of Anarchist Praxes

Organizers

Federico Ferretti           University College Dublin, Ireland.

Farhang Rouhani           University of Mary Washington, USA.

Simon Springer             University of Victoria, Canada.

Richard J. White            Sheffield Hallam University, UK.

A misanthrope might compare the vices of our European society to a hidden evil that gnaws at the individual from within, whereas the vices of American society appear outwardly in all of their hideous brutality. The most violent hatred separates factions and races: the slavery advocate abhors the abolitionist, the white loathes the Negro, the native detests the foreigner, the wealthy planter disdains the small landowner, and rivalry of interests creates an insurmountable barrier of mistrust even between related families.

Elisee Reclus, (1885) A Voyage to New Orleans.

An anarchist praxis within geography continues to inspire and invite new imaginaries and praxis to flourish within the discipline.  In recent years, anarchist geographers have revitalised approaches toward radical learning spaces (Rouhani, 2017, Springer et al, 2016); historical geographies (Ferretti 2015; Springer 2016), neoliberalism (Springer 2011), post-statist geographies (Barrera and Ince, 2016), practices of freedom (White et al, 2016); postcoloniality/decoloniality (Barker and Pickerill 2012), theories of resistance (Souza et.al 2016); urbanism (Souza 2014), nonhuman animal oppression (White, 2017) and a reassessment of our discipline’s radical potential (Springer 2014, 2016), among others. While wishing to see these anarchist geographies unfold still further, at this point in time – and with the AAG conference being held in New Orleans – we feel it is particularly relevant and important to invite papers that engage directly with the following three areas:

1. Anarchist Geographies and Anti-racism/ intersectionality.

The topics of anti-racist and anti-slavery struggles are part of the anarchist tradition since Reclus’s sojourn in Louisiana from 1853 to 1855 and his “anarchist abolitionism”, a fight that the anarchist geographer pursued all his life long. Today, the issues on anti-racism, intersectionality and the claims of all marginalised and “racialized” communities, often linked to anti-fascism and anti-sexism stances, are more and more urgent all over the world, as recently shown by the case of Afro-American communities. Any paper discussing past, present and future anarchist engagements on these topics is welcome.

2. Anarchist Geographies and Colonialism, postcolonialism, and decolonization

Some lasting misunderstandings concern the relations between anarchism and decolonialism. While focusing on the intersection of all forms of oppression (state, capital, churches, armies, authorities …) anarchism rarely flagged anti-colonialism or postcolonialism as its main feature. Yet, this did not impede that anarchist were historically among the most radical anti-colonialist from the time of early anarchist geographers, nor that anarchist thinking is devoid of elements which can nourish to-day debates on “de-colonising geography”. For instance, the anarchist refusal of a political avant-garde anticipated recent political and epistemological claims from decolonial scholars, put in practice by movements of indigenous resistance such as the Zapatistas. Contributions on anarchism and anti-colonialism, de-colonisation, decoloniality and indigeneity are especially welcome.

3. Anarchist Geographies and Critical Pedagogies, Learning, and Teaching in the University

Anarchist commitment to pedagogies at all levels, from primary school to university, has been traditionally deployed in both the experimentation of freed schools and universities, self-organised outside any intervention of the state or of main educational institutions, and the work within existing institutions which can often provide a tribune to divulgate critical and anarchist contents. In these situations, one might find spaces for both experimentation and struggle against political and intellectual domination. Theoretical reflexions and cases of concrete experiences are both welcome in the context of a discussion on challenges to state and mainstream pedagogies and their spatialities.

Other areas may include, but are not limited to:

References

Barker, A. J., & Pickerill, J. (2012). Radicalizing relationships to and through shared geographies: Why anarchists need to understand indigenous connections to land and place. Antipode, 44(5), 1705-1725.

Barrera, G. and Ince, A. (2016). Post-statist epistemology and the future of geographical knowledge production. In Springer, S., Douza, M. L de, and White, R. J. (Eds.) The Radicalization of Pedagogy: Anarchism, Geography and the Spirit of Revolt. Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield.

Ferretti, F. (2015). Anarchism, geohistory, and the Annales: rethinking Elisée Reclus’s influence on Lucien Febvre. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 33, 347-365.

Rouhani, F. (2017). Creating Transformative Anarchist-Geographic Learning Spaces. In Robert Haworth and John Elmore (ed).Out of the Ruins: The Emergence of New Radical Informal Learning Spaces, Oakland: PM Press.

Souza, M. L. de (2014). Towards a libertarian turn? Notes on the past and future of radical urban research and praxis. City, 18(2), 104-118.

Springer, S. (2011). Public space as emancipation: meditations on anarchism, radical democracy, neoliberalism and violence. Antipode, 43(2), 525-562.

Springer, S. (2013). Anarchism and Geography: a brief genealogy of Anarchist Geographies. Geography Compass, 7(1), 46-60.

Springer, S. (2014). Why a radical geography must be anarchist. Dialogues in Human Geography, 4(3), 249-270.

Springer, S. (2016). The Anarchist Roots of Geography: Towards Spatial Emancipation. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Springer, S, White R.J, Souza, M.L de. (2016) (eds.) The Radicalization of Pedagogy: Anarchism, Geography and the Spirit of Revolt, Rowman & Littlefield, Lanham.

White R.J, Springer, S., Souza, ML de. 2016 (eds.) The Practice of Freedom: Anarchism, Geography and the Spirit of Revolt, Rowman & Littlefield, Lanham.

White, R.J (2017) Rising to the challenge of capitalism and the commodification of animals: post-capitalism, anarchist economies and vegan praxis. In David Nibert (eds) Animal Oppression and Capitalism. Praeger, Conneticut.

We also welcome presentations in non-traditional and participatory formats. If you would like to participate in other ways (e.g. discussant) then please feel free to contact us as well. Please send abstracts of no more than 250 words to Richard.White@shu.ac.uk; simonspringer@gmail.com; frouhani@umw.edu; and Federico.Ferretti@unige.ch by October 18^th 2017.

Please note: once you have submitted an abstract to us and it is accepted, you will also need to register AND submit an abstract on the AAG website on/ before October 25^th.

More details about submitting abstracts can be found here: annualmeeting.aag.org/AAGAnnualMeeting/AAGAnnualMeeting/…

Race, capitalism, and metropolitan space under (late) neoliberalism

Last year’s presidential election breathed new life into-and shined new light onto-one of the more contentious and protracted themes to occupy left political praxis and theory in the last century: Race? Or class? Decades of critical scholarship tell us that this polarized construction fails both to explain the contemporary world and to produce emancipatory political possibilities to fundamentally change it (See, e.g., Hall 1980, Robinson, 2000, Roediger, 2017). Nevertheless, the power of this particular duality remains seductive.

As scholars of the urban-and especially as geographers-we are called to consider these thorny, interrelated problems as they mark and are marked by the urban landscape. Yet the constellation of issues which the race/class binary responds to, is produced with, or otherwise engages is made all the more difficult to contend against or otherwise resolve as the hegemonies of racial neoliberalism (Goldberg, 2009) and neoliberal urbanism (Brenner & Theodore, 2002) have ossified in recent decades.

With the foregoing in mind, this session aims to interrogate the interconnections between race and class, capitalism and white supremacy as they are manifest in metropolitan space in the era of (late) neoliberalism. Explicitly rejecting the race/class binary in favor of intersectional and synthetic analysis, while also welcoming the particular challenges and possibilities of theorizing race and class (and contesting interstitial injustice) under neoliberalism, we invite participants to speak to the following themes:

• Racial and class struggles over sub/urban space
• Racial neoliberalism and economic development
• Race/class dimensions of housing finance or policy
• Economic and racial inequality under (late) neoliberalism
• Suburbanization of poverty and racial diversity (or segregation)
• Spaces of concentrated poverty and bounded blackness
• Commodification of diversity

Participants should submit abstracts to Coleman Allums (coleman.allums@uga.edu), Scott Markley (scott.markley@uga.edu), and Taylor Hafley (taylor.hafley@uga.edu) by the 20th of October. Notification of acceptance will be communicated to participants by the 22nd, and participants must be fully registered by the 25^th.

References

Brenner, N. and Theodore, N. 2002. Cities and the geographies of ‘actually existing neoliberalism.’ Antipode. 34(3):349-379.
Goldberg, D. T. 2009. The Threat of Race: Reflections on Racial Neoliberalism. Malden, MA:Wiley-Blackwell.
Hall, S. 1980. Race, articulation and societies structured in dominance. In Sociological Theories: Race and Colonialism (1980), pp. 305-345.
Roediger, D. R. 2017. Class, Race, and Marxism. London: Verso.
Robinson, C. J. 2000. Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition. ChapelHill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press.

CALL FOR PAPERS

Breaking boundaries from bottom to top: critical approaches to migration.

Organizers: Dan Johnston, (Indiana University Bloomington), Christabel Devadoss (West Virginia University), and Ágnes Erőss (Geographical Institute RCAES Hungarian Academy of Sciences).

Research on migration is increasingly important in Geography and across disciplines. Yet, too often contemporary research concerning migration is stuck asking the same questions despite a changing political climate, applying top-down perspectives and terminology. As a result of new trends in global migration, classical definitions of individuals and groups, e.g. refugee, non-resident alien, immigrant, etc., often used in research on migration, no longer sufficiently describe current mobilities. In an era when migration is a global phenomenon, and despite the movement against borders (Agnew 2007, 2008; Anderson, Sharma, and Wright 2009), many nation states are implementing new physical and institutional barriers to limit free mobility (Mountz 2010; Jones 2012, 2016). Importantly, the current global political climate is also encouraging dehumanizing discrouse surrounding migration and encouraging violence against minorities in these spaces (Jones 2016, Smith 2016).

This calls for new, innovative ways of elucidating phenomena surrounding migration and the way we research it. For this series of sessions, we seek papers that take a critical approach to researching migration. This includes, but is not limited to:

• Forced migrations, IDPs, Urban refugees, Camps, International refugee crisis
• Gateway/Non-gateway cities, New Destination, Under-researched origins/destinations
• Borderland mobilities and externalization of the border, securitization of migration
• The effects of migration at different scales on sending societies (from regional to family level), analysing/questioning the driving forces causing migration
• Benefits and losses of migration on sending and hosting societies
• Diasporic and expatriate communities, Diaspora strategies and engagement
• More humanizing, creative approaches to migration
• The effects of borders and rhetoric on everyday communities and people
• Decolonizing approaches to research on migration

Interested contributors should submit your PIN and an abstract of approximately 250 words to the organizers by October 15, 2017: Dan Johnston (dantjohn@indiana.edu), Christabel Devadoss (cadevadoss@mix.wvu.edu), and Ágnes Erőss (agnes.eross@gmail.com).

CFP: Dimensions of dispossession: Spatialities, temporalities, and (im)materialities

2018 American Association of Geographers Annual Conference, New Orleans Louisiana 

Session Co-organizers

Joel E. Correia, University of Arizona Center for Latin American Studies

Max Counter, University of Colorado at Boulder Department of Geography

Discussant

To be confirmed

Dimensions of dispossession: Spatialities, temporalities, and (im)materialities

Dispossession is a central concept in the critical human geography lexicon with expansive use across various subfields that could almost certainly qualify it as one of Raymond Williams’ famed “keywords”  (Williams 1976). The literature on dispossession and its relation to capital accumulation bears witness to its enduring theoretical and empirical significance (See, for example, Marx 1976 [1867]; Harvey 2003; Glassman 2006; Hart 2006; Li 2010a; 2010b; Ballvé 2012; Chakravartty and Fernando da Silva 2012; Perreault 2012; Levien 2015; inter alia). Post-colonial, feminist, and critical social theorists have provided further perspectives that center on the affective aspects of dispossession as a more-than-material process (See, for example, Fanon 1952; Agamben 2005; Casolo and Doshi 2013; Coulthard 2014; Bhandar and Toscano 2016). Building from recent scholarship (Butler and Anthanisou 2013; Gordillo 2014; Fernandez 2017; Counter 2017; Bryan 2017), this session invites papers that explore the multiplicity of dispossession, taking as its point of departure that dispossession is a spatial process shaped by capital accumulation, but also more-than-material, affective, and temporal. In sum, we are interested in work, that through both empirical rigor and theoretical sensitivity, explores the very idea of “dispossession” and how it is manifest through an array of different dimensions.

Relevant questions include, but are not limited to, the following:

• How are multiple facets of the concept dispossession effective for understanding current processes of dispossession as a lived experience?
• What are the limits to the various ways the term “dispossession” is understood and utilized in contemporary critical geographic scholarship? In what ways can those limits be overcome?
• What new aspects might the term further encapsulate?
• How is dispossession manifest vis-a-vis temporal, spatial, and (im)material geographies?
• And, importantly, how might geographers develop a sensitivity to illuminating these multiple dimensions of dispossession in their empirical work?

If interested, please email you 250 word abstract to Joel Correia (jcorreia@email.arizona.edu) or Max Counter (max.counter@colorado.edu) by October 9th. We will notify selected participants by October 15th 2017.

References

Agamben, G. 2005. State of exception. Atell, K. trans. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Bryan, J. 2017. Oil, indigeneity, and dispossession. In Other geographies: The influences of  Michael Watts. Chari, S. Freidberg, S., Gidwani, V., Ribot, J., and Wolford, W. eds. p. 157-168. Oxford: Wiley Blackwell.

Ballvé, T. 2012.. Everyday state formation: Territory, decentralization, and the narco landgrab in Colombia. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 30(4), 603-622.

Bhandar, B. and Toscano, A. 2016. Representing Palestinian dispossession: Land, property, and photography in the settler colony. Settler Colonial Studies, 7(1): 1-18.

Butler, J. and Athanisou, A. 2013. Dispossession: The performative in the political. Cambridge: Polity Press.

Casolo, J. and Doshi, S. 2013. Domesticated dispossessions? Towards a transnational feminist geopolitics of development. Geopolitics, 18(4): 800-834.

Coulthard, G.S. 2014. Red skins, white masks: Rejecting the colonial politics of recognition. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Counter, M. 2017. ‘La doble condición’: landmine victims, forced displacement, and disability in Colombia’s Magdalena Medio. Social & Cultural Geography, 1-25.DOI:10.1080/14649365.2017.1280616

Chakravartty, P. and Fernando da Silva, D. 2012. Accumulation, dispossession, and debt: The racial logic of global capitalism-an introduction. American Quarterly, 64(3): 361-385.

Fanon, F. 1965. Black skins, white masks. New York: Grove Press.

Fernandez, B. 2017. Dispossession and the depletion of social reproduction. Antipode, DOI: 10.1111/anti.1235.

Glassman, J. 2006. Primitive accumulation, accumulation by dispossession, and accumulation by ‘extra-economic’ means. Progress in Human Geography, 30(5): 608-625.

Gordillo, G. 2014 Rubble: The afterlife of destruction. Durham: Duke University Press

Hart, G. 2006. Denaturalizing dispossession: Critical ethnography in the age of resurgent imperialism. Antipode, 38(5): 977-1004.

Harvey, D. 2003. The new imperialism. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Levien, Michael. 2015. “From Primitive Accumulation to Regimes of Dispossession: Theses on India’s Land Question.” Economic and Political Weekly 50(22): 146-157

Li, T.M. 2010a. Indigeneity, capitalism, and the management of dispossession. Current Anthropology, 51(3): 385-414.

______. 2010b. To make live or let die? Rural dispossession and the protection of surplus populations. Antipode, 41(s1): 66-93.

Marx, K. 1976 [1867]. Capital: A critique of political economy volume one. Fowkes, B. trans. London: Penguin Books.

Perreault, T. 2012. Dispossession by accumulation? Mining, water, and the nature of enclosure on the Bolivian Altiplano. Antipode, 45(5): 1050-1069.

Williams, R. (1976). Keywords: a vocabulary of society and culture. Fontana/Croom Helm, London.

Organizers: Francis Massé (Dept. of Geography, York University), Jared Margulies (Department
of Politics, University of Sheffield)
Discussant: TBA

From extralegal rhino and elephant hunting, to illegal timber harvesting, to illegal, unregulated,
and underreported fishing (IUU), and the sourcing and trade of birds and reptiles, wildlife crime
and the responses to it are gaining increasing scholarly and policy attention. The International
Consortium on Combating Wildlife Crime (ICCWC) defines wildlife as “all fauna and flora”
(CITES, 2017). It defines crime as “acts committed contrary to national laws and regulations
intended to protect natural resources and to administer their management and use” (Ibid). At the
same time, wildlife crime is also transnational in scope, as the transport and sale of illicitly
harvested or otherwise protected species of fauna and flora make up the growing illegal wildlife
trade (IWT), a multi-billion dollar a year industry (UNDP, 2015).

Studying wildlife crime and the responses to it thus requires multiscalar research including the
spaces and sites of extraction, transit, and consumption of wildlife, to the connections and flows
in-between that span the local to the global. This includes spaces of conservation, the open seas,
surrounding communities, ports of entry and exit, global meetings, and (il)legal sites of purchase
and consumption both online and offline (Hansen et al., 2012; Hübschle, 2016a, 2016b; White,
2016). Efforts to combat wildlife crime similarly take us from local areas of sourcing, such as
protected areas (Lemieux, 2014; Lunstrum, 2014), to international forums and regional policing
agreements (White, 2016), and demand-reduction campaigns (TRAFFIC, 2017). Such efforts
involve communities (Massé et al., 2017; Roe et al., 2015) and increasingly more-thanconservation
actors, both state and non-state (Nurse, 2013). Put simply, wildlife crime and the
ways in which it is responded to are not relegated to a certain scale or political-ecological space.

Moreover, while much of the above might reflect or embody familiar geographical, politicalecological,
and socio-ecological dynamics, we are also seeing new and changing dynamics and
spatialities concerning wildlife crime and efforts to combat it (Büscher, Forthcoming). These
dynamics are shaped by a variety of factors including the very labelling of the illicit harvesting
of wildlife as “crime” and those who engage with harvesting as “criminals.” Wildlife crime is
also increasingly framed as a crisis, “war”, or a security issue connected to organized crime and
terrorism that enfold wildlife crime in geopolitical dynamics that are shaping responses to it and
where such responses take place (Büscher, Forthcoming; Duffy, 2014, 2016; Marijnen, 2017).

The result is that wildlife crime, responses to wildlife crime, and the studying of each is taking
place in new spaces and at new scales prompting an engagement with what might be termed
more-than-conservation spaces, actors, and interests. It is these changing geographies and related
political-/socio-ecological dynamics that this session is primarily interested in. Drawing on the
above, there are three key areas of focus for this session:
1. The spaces (and places) of wildlife crime and responses to it;
2. The ways in which the political-ecological and socio-ecological dynamics of wildlife crime
intersect with the geopolitical and political-geographic;
3. How these changes might influence or necessitate new approaches to studying wildlife crime.

Of particular interest are presentations that bring light to novel developments and/or changes to
each with a view to why such changes are occurring and what the implications might be.
Specific topics might include, but are not limited to:
• The changing spatialities and geographies of wildlife crime and the responses to it.
• Legal geographies related to the illicit harvesting of wildlife and the production of
“crime” and “criminals.”
• New understandings and problematizations of what might be considered “wildlife crime”
and wildlife law enforcement.
• The multi-scalar nature of wildlife crime and the connections between local and global
ecologies and political-dynamics.
• Shifting and new geopolitics and political-geographies of wildlife crime and responses.
• The intersection of wildlife crime and related enforcement measures with other sectors
and geopolitical, political-geographical, and political-ecological dynamics.
• Theoretical and conceptual approaches to studying wildlife crime.
• Innovative ways to study wildlife crime and responses to it.

Please e-mail abstracts of up to 250 words to Francis Massé (massef@yorku.ca) and Jared
Margulies (j.margulies@sheffield.ac.uk) by October 15th. Successful applicants will be
contacted no later than October 20th and will need to submit their abstract online to the AAG
portal thereafter.

Francis Massé, Ph.D. Candidate, York University
Jared Margulies, Post-Doctoral Research Fellow, University of Sheffield

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