Call for Papers: American Association of Geographers (AAG) Annual Meeting, 2018
April 10-14, 2018 in New Orleans, LA
Productive Imaginaries of Crime and (In)security
Organizers: Stefano Bloch (University of Arizona) and Dugan Meyer (University of Kentucky)
Abstract Submission Deadline: October 23, 2017
“Security is an illusion that has forgotten it is an illusion.”
-Mark Neocleous and George Rigakos, Anti-Security: A Declaration (2011)
Logics of security have long been central to the (re)production of social order. It may even be said that the concept of security is the very cornerstone of liberal modernity (Neocleous 2008). But as a growing body of critical scholarship has brought increasingly into focus, security is neither cohesive nor neutral. Moreover, it cannot be understood but through its own shadow: insecurity. In this sense the project of securing civil society– which is the fundamental ambition of policing– must be understood as productive, and not simply productive of order, but of the persistent specter of its opposite as well. For this reason our attention is drawn to the imaginaries of insecurity– of which crime is one particularly potent form– and to the productive roles that those imaginaries play in projects of order.
This paper session seeks to bring together scholars interested in exploring such productive imaginaries. How are shifting conceptualizations of crime, disorder, and other perceived threats to social order used to mobilize discourses, bodies, institutions, policies, and politics within broader projects of order? How might we analyze, visualize, and politicize the dialectics of fear and desire that animate state power and processes of racialization?
Contributors may address this topic from a variety of angles. While we are particularly interested in work that engages critically with imaginaries of crime and criminality, potential participants need not necessarily limit themselves to this frame. We invite contributions that intersect with and/or build upon the following topics or perspectives:
- Social theory and policing
- Productive capacities of crime discourse
- Mechanisms of fear and anxiety in urban politics
- Affective perspectives on othering and exclusion
- Intersections of criminality and social death
- Geographic perspectives on social threat
- State security politics and pacification
- Rhetoric of criminality, (dis)order, and (in)security
Potential participants should send an abstract of a maximum of 250 words to Stefano Bloch (s.bloch@arizona.edu) and Dugan Meyer (dugan.meyer@uky.edu) by Monday, October 23. A notification of acceptance with further instructions will be sent by Wednesday, October 25, 2017.