Organizers: Christopher Lizotte1,3 and Derek Ruez2,3
We are witnessing an acceleration of human movement across borders, as well as the growing influence of reactionary political movements that have declared themselves in opposition to this movement across a number of contexts. The crises, both exceptional and everyday, facing many of those who cross borders become reimagined as crises facing nation-states. Populist nationalists contest the globalization agenda pursued over the past several decades by political and economic elites, even as they demonize migrants and make claims to imagined national pasts of racial purity and social harmony. At the same time, migrants and their allies struggle against an increasingly normalized xenophobic and fascist ultra-right fringe and often hostile state institutions in order to make space for themselves in receiving societies.
With the upending of the longstanding political coalitions that have been at the heart of the neoliberal globalization consensus, it is more vital than ever to understand how state power, political action, and the structural positionings of political subjects intertwine to produce new spaces in which definitions and conditions for citizenship and belonging are being reworked. Exciting work in feminist geopolitics (Massaro and Williams 2013), the politics of citizenship (Ehrkamp and Jacobson 2015), queer migrations (Rouhani 2016), and geosocial topologies (Mitchell and Kallio 2017), point the way to a broader range of spaces, temporalities, actors, and forces shaping these dynamics—where intimate and everyday lived experience emerges as generative sites of action in and across a plural and uneven world. In this session, we seek to build on these conversations, and we welcome theoretical and empirical contributions that direct attention to the ways structural power intersects with individual and collective agencies to produce new kinds of borders, subjectivities, and citizenships. Such contributions could include, but are not limited to:
- The role of faith-based communities and practices in transnational migration
- How intimate socialities intersect with individualistic and heteronormative migration politics/policies
- The role of educational institutions in reproducing or challenging state geopolitical discourses
- Dominating/missing issues in the current processes of geo-socialisation
- Citizenship as naturalized, contested, and/or experienced
- How rights to be/act as respected members of political communities are gained and lost
- How receptivity to migrants is constructed in a range of sites and institutions
- Which aspects of “geo” are emphasized and downplayed, in current geosocial, geopolitical, and geoeconomic discussions and practices
Please send abstracts of no more than 250 words to christopher.lizotte@helsinki.fi and derek.ruez@uta.fi by October 23th.
1 Department of Geography and Geosciences, University of Helsinki
2 Space and Political Agency Research Group, University of Tampere
3 RELATE (The Relational and Territorial Politics of Bordering, Identities and Transnationalization) Centre of Excellence
References
Ehrkamp, P. & Jacobsen, M. (2015). Citizenship. The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Political Geography (eds. J. Agnew V. Mamadouh, A. Secor, J. Sharp). Wiley Blackwell, pp. 152-164.
Massaro, V. A. & Williams, J. (2013). Feminist geopolitics. Geography Compass 7(8): 567-577.
Mitchell, K. & Kallio, K. P. (2017). Spaces of the geosocial: Exploring transnational topologies. Geopolitics 22(1): 1-14.
Rouhani, F. (2016). Queer political geographies of migration and diaspora. The Routledge Research Companion to Geographies of Sex and Sexualities (eds. G. Brown, K. Browne). Routledge, pp. 229-236.