CfP: From the Inside Out: Uncovering Administrative Legal Geographies

2nd Call for Papers – Annual Meeting of the American Association of Geographers, 2018

From the Inside Out: Uncovering Administrative Legal Geographies

Legal geographies have laid bare law’s complex action within and against state power. These include delineating spaces of incarceration, protection, and refuge; differentiating public from private and citizen from migrant; and contesting social and ecological injustice from the courts to the streets. Indeed, law’s many contexts and effects embody multiple economic, social, historical, and ecological processes. Accordingly, legal geographies advance theories of performance, knowledge, and governmentality as well as state-making (Braverman et al. 2015, Dean 2009, Mitchell 1991).

Legal administration is no mundane bureaucratic matter, then, but a diverse field of socio-spatial practice across jurisdictions and places. By “administrative legal geographies” we mean the study of these practices and their social, spatial, and environmental implications. Examining them reveals contradictions and limits of global governance, as well as new articulations of (neo)liberal and authoritarian state order.

Yet analyzing administration faces considerable obstacles. Many administrative practices are hidden to non-specialists, securitized, or highly technical. Scholars have often misapprehended administration as purely “procedural,” rather than “substantive” in its own right, an analytically costly separation (Benson 2015). Many have argued that focusing on administrative practices ultimately detracts from environmental and social justice goals (eg Pulido et al. 2016). Recent research illustrates the import of administrative practice: from institutionalizing exclusionary politics of recognition in postcolonial society (Coulthard 2014), to the limits of rights regimes in protecting people from violence (Spade 2011), to forestalling appropriate responses to climate crisis (Herbert et al. 2013).

We welcome papers from across geography and other social sciences that extend these lines of inquiry to examine administrative legal geographies in substantive, theoretical, or methodological terms. Possible guiding questions include:

How do particular administrative practices produce and/or depend upon spaces, and with what consequences and ties to wider social dynamics?
How can we theorize administrative legal processes and practices in ways valid and useful not only to academic geographers, but to other social scientists and practitioners (including lawyers, non-governmental organizations, social movement actors, civil servants, and even the general public)?
How might ethnographic, textual, participatory, or other methods help to illuminate practices of administration, their consequences, and their analysis? What ethical and logistical issues attend such projects?

If interested, please send the session organizers your name, institutional affiliation, and a paper abstract of up to 250 words by Monday, October 2. We will reply to proposals by Tuesday, October 10. Sponsored by the AAG’s Political Geography Specialty Group and Legal Geography Specialty Group.
Session organizers:

Brandon Derman, (bderm2@uis.edu), Department of Environmental Studies, University of Illinois at Springfield
Tiffany Grobelski (tlg6@uw.edu), U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, United States Department of Homeland Security
Jesse McClelland (jmcclell@uw.edu), Department of Geography, University of Washington

References

Benson, M.H. (2015). “Rules of Engagement: The spatiality of judicial review,” in Braverman, I., Blomley, N., Delaney, D., & Kedar, A. The Expanding Spaces of Law: A Timely Legal Geography. Stanford University Press.

Braverman, I., Blomley, N., Delaney, D., & Kedar, A. (2015). The Expanding Spaces of Law: A Timely Legal Geography. Stanford University Press.

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

Dean, M. (2009). Governmentality: Power and rule in modern society. Sage Publications Ltd.

Goodale, M., and S. E Merry. (2007). The Practice of Human Rights: Tracking Law between the Global and the Local. Cambridge Univ Press.

Herbert, S., Derman, B., & Grobelski, T. (2013). “The Regulation of Environmental Space,” Annual Review of Law and Social Science 9: 227-247.

Mitchell, T. (1991). The limits of the state: beyond statist approaches and their critics. The American Political Science Review, 85(1), 77–96.

Pulido, L., Kohl, E., & Cotton, N. (2016) “State Regulation and Environmental Justice: The Need for Strategy Reassessment,” Capitalism Nature Socialism 27(2): 12-31.

Spade, D. (2011). Normal Life: Administrative violence, critical trans politics, and the limits of law. Brooklyn, NY: South End Press.

CfP: Violent Atmospheres and Weathered Livelihoods in Southeast Asia

Call for Papers AAG – New Orleans, 2018

Organizers:
Wolfram Dressler, School of Geography, University of Melbourne, Australia (wolfram.dressler@unimelb.edu.au)
Mary Mostafanezhad, Department of Geography, University of Hawai’i at Mãnoa (mostafan@hawaii.edu)

Discussant:
Jason Moore, Department of Sociology, Binghamton University, New York

Violent Atmospheres and Weathered Livelihoods in Southeast Asia

Emerging work on the political ecology of environmental crises addresses the social and material production of crisis, its relation to changing modes of production, and new configurations of capital. Scholars’ framings of crises have drawn upon Marxist conceptualizations of crisis theory and the internal contradictions of capital accumulation. The “crisis as contradiction” has provided analytical fodder for social theorists who have used crisis as a way into critically engaging these internal contradictions (Harvey, 2011, 2015; Moore, 2011, 2015). Early on, Sahlins (1972), for instance, referred to disasters as “revelatory crises” involving processes by which the structural contradictions of the mode of production are revealed through interruptions to socio-economic life that cannot be ignored. A crisis of social reproduction can also result in the exposure of the structural contradictions of modes of production (Watts,1987; Watts, 2017). Yet, crises resulting from contradictions in modes of production do not always reveal more than they conceal. Crises have also been shown to further conceal the deteriorating conditions and relations of production by diverting attention to the branches of crisis itself rather than its structural roots (Soloway, 1994). In other cases, critical scholarship has increasingly interrogated how the moments and periods of ecological disaster can drive acute financial crises (Peet, Robbins & Watts, 2010). Capitalist brokers exploit and ‘overcome’ crises through the further extraction of value through spatial fixes by reorganizing, expanding and connecting ideas, capital and labour to create new markets and financing opportunities (Harvey, 2006). Still others have pointed to the relation between environmental crises and the geographical patterns of metabolic rift produced in part through the division of labor between the “town and countryside”. These relations are seen as reflective of the socioecological contradictions internal to the development of capitalism and the development of environmental crisis itself (Moore, 2015). In Southeast Asia, theories of environmental crises are increasingly brought to bear on regional agrarian and livelihood transitions. Discourses of deforestation, for example, are often framed by urban dwellers as environmental crises that are widely blamed on the rural poor (Mostafanezhad et al., 2016; Montefrio and Dressler, 2016).

Our call for papers aims to address how various forms of atmospheric crisis emerge, manifest and are represented in the context of capital over-accumulation and livelihood transitions in mainland and insular Southeast Asia. We seek papers that critically engage how violent atmospheric processes and events such as climate change, haze and air pollution intersect with and impact upon other socio-political, economic and environmental process in rural and urban spaces. Rightly or wrongly, violent atmospheres are attributed to a range of sources –small-scale farming, fuel wood burning, urbanization, agro-industrial expansion, and large-scale land conversion etc– that are entangled with livelihoods, emerging translocal struggles and conflicts, and dominant discourses of modernization.

The papers in this panel will address the ways in which blame and responsibility for the causes of environmental crises are represented in official and popular discourses, as well as how these discourses, in turn, mediate everyday practices of environmental governmentality that both challenge and enable livelihood practices. Livelihood transitions and related processes are driving changes in urban-rural land relations in Southeast Asia that often reproduce ethnic, class and urban-rural relations. When we dig to the core of debates over atmospheric crises, we often find historically layered and highly politicized livelihood struggles. In this way, livelihoods in crisis are intimately entangled in webs of meaning as well as modes of production. This panel seeks to integrate emerging scholarship on the political ecology of livelihoods with violent environments (Peluso & Watts, 2001), in order to push forward new understandings of how the material and discursive production of environmental crises mediate increasingly interrelated urban-rural livelihoods in Southeast Asia.

Papers may cover a range of themes and issues in Southeast Asia such as:

– the political economy of haze (and other atmospheric pollutants)
– agro-industrialization, livelihoods, and micro-climates
– peasant resistance, social movements, and climate change
– indigenous perceptions of, and adaptation to, extreme weather events/ El Niño/ climate change
– livelihood change, migration and extreme weather (rural-urban nexus)

If you are interested in joining this panel please send an abstract to Mary (mostafan@hawaii.edu) and Wolfram (wolfram.dressler@unimelb.edu.au).

References:

Harvey, D. (2006). The Limits to Capital. London: Verso Press.
Harvey, D. (2011). The enigma of capital: and the crises of capitalism, London: Profile Books.
Harvey, D. (2015). Crisis theory and the falling rate of profit. In Subasat, T. (Eds) The Great Financial Meltdown (pp. 37-54). Northampton: Edward Elgar Publishing.
Moore, J. W. (2011). “Transcending the metabolic rift: a theory of crises in the capitalist world-ecology.” The Journal of Peasant Studies 38(1): 1-46.
Moore, J. W. (2015). Capitalism in the Web of Life: Ecology and the Accumulation of Capital. New York: Verso Books.
Montefrio, M. J. F., & Dressler, W. H. (2016). The green economy and constructions of the “idle” and “unproductive” uplands in the Philippines. World Development, 79, 114-126.
Mostafanezhad, M., Norum, R., Shelton, and E., Thompson, A. (2016). Political Ecology of Tourism: Community, Power and the Environment. New York: Routledge.
Peet, R., Robbins, P., & Watts, M. (Eds.). (2010). Global Political Ecology. New York: Routledge.
Peluso, N. L., & Watts, M. (Eds.). (2001). Violent environments. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
Sahlins, Marshall. 1972. Stone age economics. Chicago: Aldine and Atherton.
Watts, M. (1987). Drought, environment and food security: some reflections on peasants, pastoralists and commoditization in dryland West Africa. Drought and hunger in Africa. 171-211.
Watts, M. J. (2017). “Frontiers: Authority, Precarity, and Insurgency at the Edge of the State.” World Development (in press).

CfP: Political Geologies: Earth Sciences and Subterranean Territorialization

Political Geologies: Earth Sciences and Subterranean Territorialization

CFP: American Association of Geographers (AAG) Annual Meeting; New Orleans, Louisiana; April 10-14, 2018

Organizers: Andrea Marston (UC Berkeley); Matt Himley (Illinois State University)

Sponsors: Cultural and Political Ecology Specialty Group; Political Geography Specialty Group

Session Description:

Recent publications have called for geographers to attend to the “verticality” and “volume” of space, including the air, oceans, and subsoil (Weizman 2007, Elden 2013, Adey 2015, Grundy-Warr et al. 2015, Steinberg and Peters 2015). Much of this work has explored volumetric space from a geopolitical perspective, emphasizing the optical techniques used to render space visible, governable, and in some cases marketable. Although perhaps inattentive to the lived experiences of three-dimensional space (Harris 2014), as a corpus this work directs attention to the scientific and technological practices through which volumetric space is known, secured, and exploited, and thus the role of these practices in the making of territory (Bridge 2013).

In this session, we build on this work with a focus on the technosciences of subterranean territorialization, aiming to encompass the political/governmental, economic/commercial, and social/meaningful aspects of territorial production. While attempting to understand earth’s “deep history” and “inner structure,” geological exploration has long been linked to the production of colonial and capitalist spaces (Stafford 1990, Frederiksen 2013). Capitalist expansion relies on metals and fossil fuels buried in the subsoil, and the production of subterranean resources has gone hand in hand with the inventorying of colonial natures and colonized peoples. These interlinked processes have produced “geological landscapes” and cultivated geological senses of regional and national belonging (Braun 2000, Shen 2014). In conjunction with archeology and paleontology, geology provides earthy depth to national historical narratives, while subsoil engineering transforms such “natural inheritance” into promises of future progress. On (and in) the ground, “geologic subjects” (Yusoff 2013) continue to produce and consume the products of the subsoil, through their daily actions rendering these subterranean resources the literal bedrock of capitalist modernity.

We invite papers that explore the sciences and technologies of subterranean territorialization as they relate to questions of governance, exploitation, and belonging. Potential topics include but are not limited to:

• Politics of subterranean knowledge production
• Earth sciences and imperial expansion
• Relationship between colonial ordering of people and subsoil natures
• Earth sciences and state formation/national territorialization
• Role of earth sciences in territorial conflicts
• “Everyday verticalities” (Harris 2014) of the subsoil

Please submit your abstract of no more than 250 words to Andrea Marston (ajmarston@berkeley.edu) and Matt Himley (mdhimle@ilstu.edu) by October 9th.

Note: This session will have a discussant. Presenters will be asked to submit a written paper several weeks before the conference.

References:

Adey, P. (2015). Air’s affinities. Dialogues in Human Geography, 5(1), 54–75.

Braun, B. (2000). Producing vertical territory: geology and governmentality in late Victorian Canada. Cultural Geographies, 7(1), 7–46.

Bridge, G. (2013). Territory, now in 3D! Political Geography, 34(C), 55–57.

Elden, S. (2013). Secure the volume: vertical geopolitics and the depth of power. Political Geography, 34(C), 35–51.

Frederiksen, T. (2013). Seeing the Copperbelt: science, mining and colonial power in Northern Rhodesia. Geoforum, 44(C), 271–281.

Grundy-Warr, C., Sithirith, M., & Li, Y. M. (2015). Volumes, fluidity and flows: rethinking the ‘nature’ of political geography. Political Geography, 45(C), 93–95.

Harris, A. (2014). Vertical urbanisms. Progress in Human Geography, 39(5), 601–620.

Shen, G. Y. (2014). Unearthing the Nation: Modern Geology and Nationalism in Republican China. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Stafford, R. A. (1990). Annexing the landscapes of the past: British imperial geology in the nineteenth century. In Mackenzie, J. M (ed.) Imperialism and the Natural World. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 67-89.

Steinberg, P., & Peters, K. (2015). Wet ontologies, fluid spaces: giving depth to volume through oceanic thinking. Environment and Planning D, 33(2), 247–264.

Weizman, E. (2007). Hollow Land: Israel’s Architecture of Occupation. London, UK: Verso.

Yusoff, K. (2013). Geologic life: prehistory, climate, futures in the Anthropocene. Environment and Planning D, 31(5), 779–795.

CfP: White Supremacy and the (Re)Making of America

CFP AAG Annual Meeting New Orleans April 10-14, 2018

“White Supremacy and the (Re)Making of America”

Events from the past year in the United States indicate that far from being a “post-racial” society the United States continues to function as a white supremacist, settler state. The rise of Donald Trump and his not so subtle courting of the alt-right, the growth of extremist groups and the rise of Nazi and Klan organizations, hyper-militarized police response to the Black Lives Matter Protests as well as efforts to build a wall on the Southern border amongst other examples are indicative of the way race operates in the United States. In addition, we recognize the powerful historical precedents have been structured race relations of our moment. We propose a session that explores the ways in which rearticulations of white supremacy are tied to historically grounded geographic realities of race and empire in the (re)making of America. Specifically, we are looking for papers, of either past or present geographies, that engage with whiteness and/or race and that work through this contemporary racialized moment. Possible themes for this session include, but are not limited to:

*Historic Geographies of race and racism that explore whiteness and/or white supremacy

*Contemporary processes of racialization and efforts to remake white supremacy.

*Efforts to confront race and racism and broader efforts at decolonization

*The role of Geography in animating specific configurations of place, race and power and related to race.

Those interested in submitting a 250 word abstract should send their submissions to: Joshua Inwood (jfi6@psu.edu) and Steve Hoelscher (hoelscher@austin.utexas.edu) by October 15.

Joshua Inwood, Ph.D.

CfP: Politics of State-Change: Matter and Transition

Politics of State-Change: Matter and Transition

Call for papers: AAG New Orleans, April 10-14, 2018

Organizers: Dr Ingrid A. Medby (Oxford Brookes University) and Prof. Jason Dittmer (UCL)

Central to the politics of recent months have been concerns with the materialization of particular versions of the past in the present, with Confederate monuments serving as a flashpoint for protest, counter-protest, and bloodshed. The removal of the statues in question (and the white supremacy they materialize) is seen by both sides as a potential existential threshold that will tip the polity into a new state of being.

At the same time, debate continues to rage about climate change and our political responsibilities in the Anthropocene, not least as the US plans to withdraw from global mitigation efforts. Here, the concern is with matter in transition; it is disappearing, appearing, or reappearing precisely due to our lack of action.

Uniting these examples is the politics of presence and absence, of the material and immaterial; and at its core, the politics of matter and its transformation. Political geographers have produced rich bodies of work on both memorializations and materialities, on symbolism, affect, and the more-than-human. What we seek to interrogate in this session, however, is neither the physical absence nor presence per se, neither the solid nor the fluid. Instead, we wish to consider the state-change itself: the political effects of the processual transformation, whatever the cause or matter. From absent to present, or vice versa; from immaterial to material; from land to water to gas, solid, liquid, and air. What do these changes themselves ‘do’ to politics? How can we think of matter in its multiplicity? What are the consequences of something lost, forgotten, backgrounded, or absent reappearing – or vice versa? How are, should and can such change be responded to politically, and/or academically by political geographers? What does it do to our academic work to truly take into account the event of change itself?

We invite papers that consider these broad conceptual issues, with the aim of fostering interesting discussions. Researchers are encouraged to submit abstracts that relate to topics broadly engaging with the above.

Please email your abstract of no more than 250 words (and/or any questions) to Ingrid A. Medby (imedby@brookes.ac.uk) by Monday October 9, 2017. Please include institutional affiliation, contact details, etc.

Successful participants will be notified by October 16, and will have to pay the registration fee and submit their abstracts online at the AAG website before October 25, 2017.

CfP: The New (Ab)Normal at Borders

CFP AAG Annual Meeting New Orleans April 10 – 14 2018

“The New (Ab)Normal at Borders”

The events of the past year demonstrated that the world entered a new period of flux and uncertainty at borders. While scholars have noted the expansion of walls, security infrastructure, migrant detention, and militarized enforcement for a decade or more, in 2017 actions that would have been unthinkable even a few years ago became the new normal.

In Europe, the compassion for people on the move that existed in the early stages of the ‘migration crisis’ dissipated as countries built fences and walls and used force to prevent people from moving. Fortifying European spaces against migrants coincided with offshoring of migrant detention and deterrence, such as the EU deals with the troubled Libyan regime to detain people on the move in camps in Libya, despite evidence of the horrendous conditions, violence, and even slavery that occurs there. Italy also began to work with the Libyan coast guard to push boats back to Libya, rather than providing aid and shelter. Migrant aid boats were detained, and their operators were accused of aiding human traffickers.

In the US, newly emboldened Immigration and Customs Agents targeted long-term residents with families and stable jobs for deportation. Plans were made to build new walls on the US-Mexico border, to hire thousands of additional immigration agents, and to cut legislated immigration quotas in half. In Southeast Asia, Malaysia and Thailand put in place new regulations to crack down on migrant labor through registration systems, while the persecuted Rohingya minority, the “most friendless people in the world,” were greeted by slammed doors seemingly wherever they sought refuge in the region. In 2017, in places across the globe, there was a global shift in mood towards nationalist policies and against the rights of people to move.

For the session, we are looking for papers that document and analyze the new (ab)normal at borders. What are the strategies and tactics the state, and non-state actors, use to prevent the movement of people? Where are the locations they are put into place? What impact do they have on people on the move and people who live in the ever widening borderlands? What do these changes tell us theoretically about borders, sovereignty, mobility and the state?

Potential session participants are should contact Reece Jones (reecej@hawaii.edu) and Corey Johnson (corey_johnson@uncg.edu) by 01 October (or earlier) to indicate your interest in participating in the sessions.

New Directions in Geographies of Policing, Detention, and Mass Incarceration

[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 15^th.

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.

CfP: Geographies of Migrant Return and Removal

CFP: AAG Annual Meeting

New Orleans, LA | April 10-14, 2018

Geographies of Migrant Return and Removal

Organizers: Malene Jacobsen (University of Kentucky) and Austin Crane (University of Washington)

Sponsored by the Political Geography Specialty Group

Recent scholarship has called attention to how processes of bordering are becoming disconnected from state territorial borders, aiming to “manage” migrants internally (Coleman and Kocher 2011), externally (Bialasiewicz 2012; Casas-Cortes, et al. 2013), and transnationally (Collyer and King 2015; Mountz and Loyd 2014). Scholars have addressed a variety of geopolitical and biopolitical practices of migration management, such as the growth of detention and deportation (Collyer 2012; Mountz, et al. 2013), the economics of detention (Conlon and Hiemstra 2016), frequent transfers of detainees (Gill 2009), family detention (Martin 2011), protracted waiting and legal ambiguity (Conlon 2011; Hyndman and Giles 2011), and the role of international humanitarian organizations (Andrijasevic and Walters 2010; Ashutosh and Mountz 2011). This growing field of literature calls attention to the discursive, spatial, and (geo)political dimensions of how migration management is worked out within and between various sites.

In conversation with this body of work, this session examines the geographies of migrant return and removal. Migrant returns programs are an integral component of migration and border management around the world today, and are part of a long history of expulsion (Ngai 2004; Walters 2010). Western countries are employing various migrant removal policies – from forcible deportation to Assisted Voluntary Return and Readmission Agreements – to return non-citizens to their countries of origin or transit. These programs are variously framed by institutions and politicians as managing migration, as humanitarian, and as justified to maintain security alongside the integrity of larger asylum systems. The return and deportation of migrants have and continue to play an integral role in the geopolitical landscape and biopolitical governance of migration management.

We welcome submissions that address the politics, processes, and mechanics of migrant removal, as well as the decisions and lived realities involved with returning – of migrants and government/humanitarian practitioners. We seek submissions that bring together various disciplinary perspectives, research locations, and theoretical lenses (feminist geopolitics, postcolonial studies, critical race studies, legal geography, critical border studies, relational poverty, political economy, and related fields) to better understand the geographies of return and removal in migration management.

Possible themes and questions include:

The political discourses and rationalities of return: what are the logics and decisions involved in migrants returning or not (both from governance and migrant perspectives)?

The material processes and spaces of return: How does (voluntarily or forced) return take place? What are the spaces that make return possible (airports, detention centers, aircrafts, transit countries, offices, homes, etc.)? Which actors, techniques, places, and programs are involved in implementing or resisting returns?

The geopolitics and biopolitics of return: how is political power exercised and negotiated in relation to migrant returns (policies, laws, technologies, institutional networks, geopolitical relations between countries, and sovereignty over territory)?

The historical geographies of return: What are the historical geographies of migrant return and how might these spaces be linked to present return programs?

Please submit titles and abstracts (250 words) by October 18th to Austin Crane (acrane@uw.edu) and Malene Jacobsen (malene.jacobsen@uky.edu). We hope that participants will prepare to share paper drafts ahead of time in order to enhance our discussion.

References

Andrijasevic, Rutvica, and William Walters. 2010. “The International Organization for Migration and the international government of borders.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 28(3): 977-999.

Ashutosh, Ishan, and Alison Mountz. 2011. “Migration management for the benefit of whom? Interrogating the work of the International Organization for Migration.” Citizenship Studies 15(1): 21-38.

Bialasiewicz, Luiza. 2012. “Off-shoring and Out-sourcing the Borders of EUrope: Libya and EU Border Work in the Mediterranean.” Geopolitics 17 (4): 843–66.

Casas-Cortes, Maribel, Sebastian Cobarrubias, and John Pickles. 2013. “Re-bordering the neighbourhood: Europe’s emerging geographies of non-accession integration.” European Urban and Regional Studies 20: 37-58.

Coleman, Mathew, and Austin Kocher. 2011. “Detention, Deportation, Devolution and Immigrant Incapacitation in the US, Post 9/11.” The Geographical Journal 177 (3): 228–37.

Collyer, Michael. 2012. “Deportation and the Micropolitics of Exclusion: The Rise of Removals from the UK to Sri Lanka.” Geopolitics 12 (2): 276-292.

Collyer, Michael, and Russell King. 2015. “Producing Transnational Space International Migration and the Extra-territorial Reach of State Power.” Progress in Human Geography 39 (2): 185–204.

Conlon, Deirdre. 2011. “Waiting: Feminist Perspectives on the Spacings/timings of Migrant (im)mobility.” Gender, Place & Culture 18 (3): 353–60.

Conlon, Deirdre, Nancy Hiemstra, editors. 2016. Intimate Economies of Immigration Detention: Critical Perspectives. Routledge, NY.

Gill, Nicholas. 2009. “Governmental Mobility: The Power Effects of the Movement of Detained Asylum Seekers Around Britain’s Detention Estate.” Political Geography 28 (3): 186–96.

Hyndman, Jennifer, and Wenona Giles. 2011. “Waiting for What? The Feminization of Asylum in Protracted Situations.” Gender, Place & Culture 18 (3): 361–79.

Martin, Lauren. 2011. “The Geopolitics of Vulnerability: Children’s Legal Subjectivity, Immigrant Family Detention and US Immigration Law and Enforcement Policy.” Gender, Place & Culture 18 (4): 477–98.

Mountz, Alison, Kate Coddington, R. Tina Catania, and Jenna M. Loyd. 2013. “Conceptualizing Detention Mobility, Containment, Bordering, and Exclusion.” Progress in Human Geography 37 (4): 522–41.

Mountz, Alison, and Jenna M. Loyd. 2014. “Transnational Productions of Remoteness: Building Onshore and Offshore Carceral Regimes Across Borders.” Geographica Helvetica 69 (5): 389–98.

Ngai, Mae M. 2004. Impossible subjects: Illegal aliens and the making of modern America. Princeton University Press.

Walters, William. 2010. “Deportation, expulsion, and the international police of aliens.” in The Deportation Regime, Eds N de Genova, N Peutz. Duke University Press, Durham, NC:147-165

CfP: From the Inside Out: Uncovering Administrative Legal Geographies

Call for Papers – Annual Meeting of the American Association of Geographers, 2018

From the Inside Out: Uncovering Administrative Legal Geographies

How do particular administrative practices produce and/or depend upon spaces, and with what consequences and ties to wider social dynamics?
How can we theorize administrative legal processes and practices in ways valid and useful not only to academic geographers, but to other social scientists and practitioners (including lawyers, non-governmental organizations, social movement actors, civil servants, and even the general public)?
How might ethnographic, textual, participatory, or other methods help to illuminate practices of administration, their consequences, and their analysis? What ethical and logistical issues attend such projects?

References

Benson, M.H. (2015). “Rules of Engagement: The spatiality of judicial review,” in Braverman, I., Blomley, N., Delaney, D., & Kedar, A. The Expanding Spaces of Law: A Timely Legal Geography. Stanford University Press.