CFP — Extracting Eurasia: Power, nature, and space in regional context

AAG New Orleans, April 10-14, 2018

Sponsors: Eurasian, Political Geography, and Cultural & Political Ecology Specialty Groups
Organizer: Jesse Swann-Quinn, Syracuse University

Eurasia comprises vast populations, extreme geologic and ecological diversity, and some of the world’s most intractable geopolitical conflicts. The broad region also exhibits intense patterns and histories of resource extraction and capture, providing a cornerstone for many national economies and countless local livelihoods. From mineral and metal mining and fossil fuel drilling, to water use and forest harvesting, the arrangements that govern these extractive practices produce a wide spectrum of political, social, and environmental consequences.

This session brings together individuals whose scholarship contributes to regional understandings of these extractive patterns as they evolve across Eurasia. By encouraging contributions that incorporate political ecology, critical geopolitics, feminist methodologies and other grounded approaches to field work, this session contributes to efforts that encourage a more critical approach to the regional geographies of Eurasia. This call also acknowledges that while global networks of extraction may increasingly defy borders and challenge regional narratives, extraction and commodity chains still create numerous scales of activity from local to global, and beyond. Ultimately, these networks incorporate simultaneously local, national and transnational political and economic assemblages, and understanding the forces that produce these patterns in specifically Eurasian contexts requires a regional perspective grounded in rich, highly contextualized empirics.

This session welcomes contributions that are contemporary or historical, fieldwork driven or theoretical, and from a diversity of methodological practices. Possible topics may include, but are not limited to:

–       Authoritarian or democratizing political environments
–       Local conflict over resource management
–       Corruption among state and corporate entities
–       New materialisms in Eurasia
–       Neoliberal environmental reforms
–       Geopolitics of resource extraction and transport
–       FDI flows across borders
–       Environmental subjectivities and biopolitics
–       Newly emergent international agreements and unions in relation to conservation, resource management, etc. (e.g. Eurasian Economic Union, the One Belt One Road Initiative, etc.)
–       Shifting political identities and narratives of dis/interconnectivity
–       Ecological regionalism

Interested participants should submit inquiries and abstracts for consideration (approximately 250 words) to Jesse Swann-Quinn <jquinn@syr.edu> by October 15th. Authors will be notified by October 20th. 

Call for Papers: AAG Annual Meeting – New Orleans, USA, April 10&#8211;14, 2018

Call for Papers: Commodifying Humanitarianism: Exploring Business-Humanitarian Partnerships

American Association of Geographers Annual Meeting, New Orleans, April 10-14 2018

Today’s marketplace is inundated with products supporting humanitarian causes that promise to give aid to beneficiaries, provide ‘good feelings’ to consumers and promote the brands of corporations and humanitarian NGOs. When OXFAM International’s webshop optimistically declares, “whatever you decide to buy, your purchase will help to transform people’s lives” it feeds into a contemporary narrative where humanitarian causes, products, and consumers are tied together in seemingly unproblematic ways to ‘save the world’. Central to this contemporary ‘commodification of humanitarianism’ is the expanding and intensifying partnerships between humanitarian NGOs and private corporations at the expense of public donors. However, research on the changing nature of – and motives behind – these business-humanitarian partnerships is in short supply.

This paper session seeks contributions that contextualize and illuminate the specificities of contemporary business-humanitarian partnerships in terms of objectives, motives, and challenges. Contributions could encompass a wide range of contemporary and historical cases that address questions such as:

• How have humanitarian objectives for partnering with private corporations changed over time?
• What are the diverse motives (and perceived risks) behind contemporary business-humanitarian partnerships?
• How do humanitarian NGOs reconcile their ethical and moral authority with business and commercial logics?

Please send your title, abstract, and contact information to Mie Vestergaard (mive@ruc.dk) by October 13, 2017 to be considered for inclusion. Thank you, Mette Fog Olwig and Mie Vestergaard, Roskilde University, https://commodifyingcompassion.wordpress.com/

This session aims to investigate the effects of globalization on knowledge production throughout the world. Knowledge is socially constructed and undergoes processes of shaping and challenging. Power, influences its construct, which can be controlled and contested. Of interest are the economic, social, political and cultural causes and effects on the creation of facts, information, and skills occurring within the integration or interconnection of places in the world. Both resistance to and spread of knowledge can occur at different places over the globe. Some groups challenge the expansion of knowledge from different places viewing it as oppressive or homogenizing, while others have welcomed it as developmental and beneficial.  With the rise of populist resistance in the West, a new chapter in globalization is taking place with ramifications on the production of knowledge. Equally important is the possibility of the hybridization of local and global knowledge, where combinations and merging of both scales are created and clear demarcations are uncertain. In exploring the globalization of the production of knowledge, this session thus seeks to bring together discussions on theory, methodology (qualitative and quantitative), scale and cases studies.

Interested contributors should submit an abstract of approximately 250 words or inquiries regarding the session(s) to Tom Stieve (tomthirteen@email.arizona.edu).

Geopolitics of Displacement and Exclusion: Making and Unmaking of Refugees

 AAG, April 10-14, 2018

New Orleans, LA

Organizers: Kara Dempsey (Appalachian State University) and Orhon Myadar (University of Arizona)

As the number of refugees reaches record high globally, refugee issues have been brought to the forefront of political and public debates both nationally and internationally. The public views towards these refugees have been shaped by various mediums that disseminate images and ideas of and about refugees.

This session seeks to conceptualize refugee migration as a critical geopolitical issue and examine the theoretical and practical assumptions surrounding the humanitarian crisis. Invoking Judith Butler’s Precarious Life and Giorgio Agamben’s Bare Life, the session aims to explore the politics of making and unmaking refugees at different scales and in different milieus. Central to our understanding of the politics of refugees is the contradiction between the basic International Relations assumption based on the sanctity of the states and the forces that defy the assumption and the rigidity that comes with it. In exploring the processes of making and unmaking refugees within this contradiction, this session thus seeks to bring together discussions on topics including but not limited to: geopolitics of displacement and bordering (that of exclusion and inclusion; the travel ban); the biopolitics of making/unmaking refugees (coding, registration, incarceration, representation, exploitation and subjugation of refugee bodies); precariousness of refugee lives; refugee stories (production, narration, animation, fetishizing and silencing of refugee narratives; documenting refugee voices), racializing and essentializing tropes of refugees.

Interested contributors should submit an abstract of approximately 250 words to Kara Dempsey (dempseyke@appstate.edu) and Orhon Myadar (orhon@email.arizona.edu) by October 10, 2017.

Kara and Orhon

From Kaepernick and Qatar to Cobb County and the Kop: Critical Geographies of Sports Capitalism

Organizer: Andy Walter (University of West Georgia)

Quoting literary theorist Terry Eagleton, “No finer way of resolving the problems of capitalism has been dreamed up” than football (soccer). If this reads as an overstatement, geographer Doreen Massey argued that concerning oneself with the ways in which capital has enclosed football offers a means to understand and, on that basis, to figure out ways to challenge, neoliberalized and financialized society. Recent years have provided spectacular illustrations of both scholars’ claims and their relevance to modern sports generally. From the overt rent-seeking and subversion of local democracy by/for the Atlanta Braves in Cobb County, Georgia, to the deadly exploitation of migrant workers building stadiums for a World Cup serving as a conduit for the circulation of Qatar’s massive surpluses, sport offers a concrete picture of the modes and consequences of wealth extraction and accumulation. At the same time, professional sport provides a view of various ways in which capital’s dominant forms are challenged and grounds are potentially established to create different, less exploitative and unjust ones. For example, by “taking a knee” quarterback Colin Kaepernick inspired a players’ anti-racist movement that exposed the humanity and power of highly-skilled, highly-paid workers and ultimately disrupted the smooth multi-billion dollar flow of value in the NFL (leading NFL owners to collectively withhold work from Kaepernick as an apparent retaliation). Meanwhile, at Liverpool FC’s Anfield Stadium, the loyal supporters of the Kop end, among others elsewhere in the stadium, walked out of a match en masse to contest the narrowing of their role in the club to that of customer and to caution the American owners against treating the club as simply a financial, rather than a community, asset.

This session provides a forum for papers exploring the ways in which space and place figure into the operations and outcomes of sports capitalism as well as challenges and alternatives to it at all scales and in any region of the world. Potential topics include, but are not limited to, the connections between the production and consumption of sport as a commodity and:

Rent-seeking through land development, media rights, etc.

Labor regulation, exploitation, and organization within and beyond the stadium

Fandom and neoliberal subject formation

Fandom and solidarity

Gender/sexism/gender politics and injustices

Urban politics and citizenship

Democracy and emancipatory politics

Economic governance

Race/racism/racial injustice

Global value chains/production networks

Urban public space

Urban infrastructures

Financialization of the built environment

Commoning and expropriation

Urban and global wealth inequality

In you are interested in contributing to this session, please contact Andy Walter (awalter@westga.edu) with a description of your paper’s topic, or any questions you may have about it, by October 18.

Organizers: Francis Massé (Dept. of Geography, York University), Jared Margulies (Department
of Politics, University of Sheffield)
Discussant: Dr. Bram Büscher (Wageningen University)

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

References
Büscher, B. (Forthcoming). From Biopower to Ontopower? Violent Responses to Wildlife Crime
and the New Geographies of Conservation. Conservation and Society.
CITES. (2017). Wildlife Crime. from cites.org/eng/prog/iccwc.php/Wildlife-Crime
Duffy, R. (2014). Waging a war to save biodiversity: the rise of militarized conservation.
International Affairs, 90(4), 819-834.
Duffy, R. (2016). War, by conservation. Geoforum, 69, 238-248.
Hansen, A. L. S., Li, A., Joly, D., Mekaru, S., & Brownstein, J. S. (2012). Digital surveillance: a
novel approach to monitoring the illegal wildlife trade. PLoS One, 7(12), e51156.
Hübschle, A. (2016a). Security coordination in an illegal market: the transnational trade in
rhinoceros horn. Politikon, 1-22.
Hübschle, A. (2016b). The social economy of rhino poaching: Of economic freedom fighters,
professional hunters and marginalized local people. Current Sociology,
0011392116673210.
Lemieux, A. M. (2014). Situational prevention of poaching: Routledge.
Lunstrum, E. (2014). Green Militarization: Anti-Poaching Efforts and the Spatial Contours of
Kruger National Park. Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 104(4), 816-
832.
Marijnen, E. (2017). The ‘green militarisation’of development aid: the European Commission
and the Virunga National Park, DR Congo. Third World Quarterly, 1-17.
Massé, F., Gardiner, A., Lubilo, R., & Themba, M. (2017). Inclusive Anti-poaching? Exploring
the Potential and Challenges of Community-based Anti-Poaching. South Africa Crime
Quarterly, 60, 19-27.
Nurse, A. (2013). Privatising the green police: the role of NGOs in wildlife law enforcement.
Crime, law and social change, 59(3), 305-318.
Roe, D., Cooney, R., Dublin, H. T., Challender, D. W., Biggs, D., Skinner, D., et al. (2015).
Beyond enforcement: engaging communities in tackling wildlife crime: International
Institute for Environment and Development
TRAFFIC. (2017). Consumer Behaviour Change leading to Demand Reduction. Retrieved Sept.
1, 2017, from www.traffic.org/demand-reduction
UNDP. (2015). Combating poaching and wildlife trafficking: A priority for UNDP.
White, R. (2016). Building NESTs to combat environmental crime networks. Trends in

Geopolitics of Displacement and Exclusion: Making and Unmaking of Refugees

AAG, April 10-14, 2018

New Orleans, LA

Organizers: Kara Dempsey (Appalachian State University) and Orhon Myadar (University of Arizona)

As the number of refugees reaches record high globally, refugee issues have been brought to the forefront of political and public debates both nationally and internationally. The public views towards these refugees have been shaped by various mediums that disseminate images and ideas of and about refugees.

This session seeks to conceptualize refugee migration as a critical geopolitical issue and examine the theoretical and practical assumptions surrounding the humanitarian crisis. Invoking Judith Butler’s Precarious Life and Giorgio Agamben’s Bare Life, the session aims to explore the politics of making and unmaking refugees at different scales and in different milieus. Central to our understanding of the politics of refugees is the contradiction between the basic International Relations assumption based on the sanctity of the states and the forces that defy the assumption and the rigidity that comes with it. In exploring the processes of making and unmaking refugees within this contradiction, this session thus seeks to bring together discussions on topics including but not limited to: geopolitics of displacement and bordering (that of exclusion and inclusion; the travel ban); the biopolitics of making/unmaking refugees (coding, registration, incarceration, representation, exploitation and subjugation of refugee bodies); precariousness of refugee lives; refugee stories (production, narration, animation, fetishizing and silencing of refugee narratives; documenting refugee voices), racializing and essentializing tropes of refugees.

Interested contributors should submit an abstract of approximately 250 words to Kara Dempsey (dempseyke@appstate.edu) and Orhon Myadar (orhon@email.arizona.edu) by October 10, 2017.

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

Sponsors

Cultural and Political Ecology, Political Geography, Cultural Geography Specialty Groups

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.