[DUAL CALL FOR PAPERS]
AAG 2018 (New Orleans) and Critical Geography Conference 2017 (Penn State)
New Directions in Geographies of Policing, Detention, and Mass Incarceration
Organizers: Geoff Boyce (University of Arizona), Jenna Christian (Pennsylvania State University), and Vanessa Massaro (Bucknell University)
This call for papers invites submissions for two parallel sessions, one at the Critical Geography Conference at Penn State and one at the AAG. We welcome abstract submissions for either conference or both. Although participation in either session is not conditional on participation in both, it is our hope to build dialogue between these two sessions, with the aim of catalyzing greater disciplinary commitments toward work on these topics, and conversations and relationships among scholars who share these commitments.
These sessions will explore the embedded structural issues and possibilities related to resisting policing, detention and mass incarceration in the United States and beyond. Of course, rich veins of scholarship already speak to various dimensions of these topics, from political economies of incarceration, to the methodological challenges of studying police practice, to intersections between geographies of policing, incarceration and immigration detention and removal (Gilmore, 2007; Loyd, Mitchelson & Burridge, 2013; Coleman, 2016). However, with the emergence of powerful social movements in the United States that challenge racist articulations of police violence (along with a subsequent backlash), we are interested in probing strategies for navigating practices of solidarity and exploring what geography can bring to these efforts through the analytic and methodological sensibilities reflected in our discipline and training. We are eager to explore the host of practical, political, and epistemological problems encountered when “studying up” the state and/or, the everyday practices of state reproduction. We hope to facilitate discussion and explore new approaches to the ongoing challenges involved when approaching research from a commitment to collaboration with those responding (through everyday survival or pointed organizing) to the immediate impacts of state violence in their communities. These sessions will explore how geographic scholarship can support and complement work toward abolitionist futures while pushing a critical dialogue around these topics within the discipline and society more broadly.
Paper topics may include, but need not be limited to:
- geographic articulations of race, racism and policing;
- technologies of monitoring and surveillance;
- criminalization of youth and the school-to-prison pipeline;
- geographies of mobility and immobilities;
- civil forfeiture and financial dispossession;
- family and generational impacts;
- citizenship and immigration;
- social movement responses to state violence;
- everyday practices of care, solidarity and social reproduction;
- the politics of data, access, records and the archive; and,
- the politics of encounter and representation in the context of policing and detention.
If you are interested in participating in one or both sessions, please respond as follows:
Critical Geography Conference (https://pennstatecritcon.wordpress.com/): If you plan to attend the Critical Geography Conference, please send a title and abstract of no more than 200 words to Jenna Christian (jennachristian218@gmail.com) by September 15th.
AAG: Please send a title and abstract of no more than 250 words to Geoff Boyce (gboyce@email.arizona.edu) and Vanessa Massaro (v.a.massaro@bucknell.edu) by October 1, 2017.
Citations
-Coleman, M. (2016). State power in blue. Political geography, 51, 76-86.
-Gilmore, Ruthie Wilson (2007). Golden gulag. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
-Loyd, Jenna. M., Mitchelson, Matt., & Burridge, Andrew. (2013). Introduction: Borders, Prisons and Abolitionist Visions in Loyd, Jenna. M., Mitchelson, Matt., & Burridge, Andrew (Eds). Beyond walls and cages: Prisons, borders, and global crisis Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press.