Deadline: October 25, 2019

India has been often praised within the global community for its liberal democracy. For a less developed post-colonial country to remain committed to liberal democracy for decades is no small feat, even if it’s democratic set-up has been grossly distorted because of exploitative class relations and massive poverty of large segments of the population. But India’s liberal democracy is facing a relatively new type of threat since the early 1990s from right-wing extremism. India’s home-grown right-wing extremism or fascistic movement is headed by the militant Rashtriya Swaymsevak Sangh (RSS) that was founded in the year 1925. The Hindu-nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) is a contemporary political arm of the RSS that has gained significant electoral gains and popular support for its extremist agendas during the last 3 decades. This new threat to liberal democracy feeds off the existing problems of poverty, class, caste, gender and rural-urban contradictions across India.

The BJP runs the government of India at the central or federal level, and 18 out of 28 states are controlled by BJP Chief Ministers or coalition partners. The BJP was elected to power in 2014. BJP increased their mandate and got re-elected in 2019. The BJP and the family of far-right institutions it is a part of, are not only blatantly communal. They are also brazenly supportive of (neoliberal) capitalism, including in the form of crony-capitalism.

India is now a site of multiple crises. There is a capitalist economic crisis manifested partly as an economic slowdown. There is a political crisis — normal democratic rights (including, especially, of religious minorities and progressive individuals/organizations) are increasingly curtailed. As well, the relations between the federal center and the provinces are under severe strain, as partly seen in the elimination of the special status of Kashmir, which has been under a lockdown for months. There is a cultural crisis. Communal and Hindu-supremacist ideas are colonizing all aspects of everyday life and multiple scales of state-society relations. Myths, lies and demagogy are given the same epistemological status as knowledge-claims based on evidence and reason, thus producing an age of un-reason and anti-intellectualism. Cows in India have greater significance than Muslims and Dalits. When there is an economic crisis and when abilities to dissent and to resist attacks on livelihood are under attack, there is therefore a crisis of reproduction, a livelihood crisis for common people – the men, women and children, who toil as wage-workers or small-scale producers.

This concrete situation in the world’s largest democracy requires a rigorous and critical scrutiny. The situation raises many questions. In particular, we invite papers on the following:

1. What are the economic and political causes of the turn to the right in the world’s largest democracy?
2. What implications does such a turn to the right have for people’s movements for social and ecological justice?
3. How is the relation between Kashmir on the one hand and India and Pakistan on the other to be viewed? What does the Kashmiris’ right to self-determination mean in this current conjuncture?
4. Despite the failure of the 2014-2019 BJP government on multiple fronts, what factors made it possible for it to be re-elected, and what implications does that have for India and its relation to the new World Order with the emergence of the likes of Trump, Bolsonaro, Erdogan?
5. What is the nature of the cultural, economic and political relationship between the Indian diaspora and the Indian far-right? Why has the Indian diaspora, despite experiencing the position of racial minorities in the West, by and large been ardent supporters of BJP’s xenophobic, islamophobic and hate-filled agendas in India?
6. To what extent might India be moving towards fascism or a version of it?
7. Why has the current left movement in India failed to resist the right-ward turn, what can it do now? Might there be a need for a new kind of left movement?
8. What are the challenges for linguistic, cultural and food diversity in view of efforts to impose Hindi across India, and impose and promote North Indian Brahmanical food culture?
9. How are struggles taking place over claims on ‘history’ as RSS/BJP increasingly colonizes the discipline of history in India to champion the cause of Hindutva and mount indignity on to Muslims and Dalits?
10. What exactly is the connection between capitalism/capitalists and the right-wing movement. Are there segments within the Indian and global business class which might counter the right-ward turn in their own long-term interest?
11. Is the BJP a communal party that is pro-business or is it a pro-business party that uses communalism to garner support?
12. What explains the geographical unevenness of the right-wing movement? Can the southern half of India be a bulwark against the right-wing movement?
13. Are there fears of escalating violence, genocide of religious minorities or escalation of conflict with Pakistan to win the next general elections (by consolidating the votes the Hindu majority), particularly if the economic woes increase?

Please send us a 200-word abstract of your paper on one or more of the above inter-related topics by October 25, 2019 to one of us:

Waquar (Waquar.Ahmed@unt.edu )  or Raju (rajudas@yorku.ca).

Deadline: October 25, 2019

This panel focuses on the problems researchers may confront as they design and conduct meaningful qualitative legal research. We are interested in papers that focus on the doing of research in socio-legal spaces, including those which may be hard to access, tense, politicized or restricted. We solicit panelists whose work broadly address the following questions: what are the methods one uses to conduct legal research, study legal spaces, and gather information (Braverman, 2014)? What issues, debates, and solutions surround the practice of engaged qualitative socio-legal research?

Contributions may include:

-Methods to understand whom law affects (Dixon and Marston, 2011).
-Methods to answer particularly difficult socio-legal questions.
-Methods to address the ethical questions and problematics of socio-legal research.
-Methods to confront difficult fieldwork site scenarios, including but not limited to:

Prison/criminal justice access
Courtroom observation
(Im)migration
Interacting with legal personnel
Participant observation
Politically sensitive fieldwork
Dangerous fieldwork
Belonging/exclusion
Activist scholar considerations in legal research

Interested participants are asked to submit their abstracts to Christian Pettersen (cpetters@uga.edu) or Leanne Purdum (leannekp@uga.edu) by Friday, October 25, 2019. Selected participants will be notified by Tuesday, October 29, 2019.

Works cited:

Braverman, Irus. 2014. “Who’s Afraid of Methodology? Advocating a Methodological Turn in Legal Geography.” In The Expanding Spaces of Law: A Timely Legal Geography, edited by Nicholas K Blomley, David Delaney, Alexandre Kedar, and Irus Braverman. Stanford, Calif: Stanford University Press.

Dixon, Deborah P., and Sallie A. Marston. 2011. “Introduction: feminist engagements with geopolitics.” Gender Place And Culture 18, no. 4: 445-453.

Deadline: November 8, 2019

Description: Although awareness has grown regarding the prevalence and depth of mental health problems among members of the academic community, there is still work to be done on several fronts. One of these is creating and fostering a culture of mutual care and support among faculty, staff and students in which mental health problems are normalized. This was summed up in AAG President Dave Kaplan’s recent newsletter column: “Mental health is complex, and some issues are severe enough that they need to be tackled professionally. But would it not help everybody, those simply stressed and those truly in despair, if they could feel the meaning behind these words? We are here. For you.”

This panel is part of a linked series on mental health in the academy, together with “Addressing Experiences of Mental Health and Power Structures for Early Stage Geographers”, organized by Aida Guhlincozzi and Josh Merced. This panel focuses on practices of care directed towards mental health problems within the greater Geography community. “Care” here is defined broadly: material acts, emotional labor, and spiritual rituals are a few of its possible categories. The relationality and scale of caring practices is likewise open: caring can be a personal endeavor, between persons, or directed at an institution, community, or space. The purpose of this panel is twofold: first, to share caring practices and experiences in service to one another, and also to develop an epistemology of care (Lawson, 2007) with respect to mental health in the context of the academy. This latter point builds upon a long-standing tradition within feminist scholarship of the constitutive power of emotions and affect as productive of knowledge. By sharing with one another, we can aid each other not only in an immediate sense but also by building a collective knowledge of a praxis of mental health care situated in the specific context of the neoliberal, corporatized and inequitable 21^st-century university.

Panel participation could be directed towards, but is not limited to, the following topics:

• The decision to disclose one’s mental health status to colleagues and/or employer
• Finding community through mental health
• Mental health as experienced through axes of identity
• Strategies of self-care
• Practices of mutual support among colleagues and friends
• Mental health as a basis for solidarity across social categories (e.g. students / faculty)
• (Auto)ethnographic perspectives on mental health care practices
• Struggles to secure access to mental health care
• Experiences of, and resistance to, mental health ableism
• Expanding the view of what is recognized as “mental health”

Each panelist will prepare a 5-7 minute presentation which will be followed by a discussion.  If you are interested in being on the panel, please send a brief (no more than 250 words) proposal for your presentation to Chris Lizotte (christopher.lizotte@helsinki.fi) by Friday, November 8. Undergraduate and graduate students, independent scholars, and contingent faculty are especially encouraged to apply, but the panel is open to all members of the greater geography community.

Deadline: October 20, 2019 (but continuing on a rolling basis)

Session Organizer: Tom Narins (University at Albany)

Sponsored by the China Specialty Group, Polar Geography Specialty Group

We are entering a material revolution (Sanderson, 2015). Access to and control over key materials, namely minerals and metals, for use in a range of emerging technologies has ushered in a new era of geopolitical competitiveness and unease among countries seeking to become world leaders in critical, economically transformative, technology sectors (Dizard, 2017, Klinger 2017, Lucas and Feng, 2017). This narrative often seeks to place China (as an emerging economy), in direct competition with other developed and emerging economies seeking economic prosperity on the global stage. As national and global economies become ever more dependent on digital and information technologies, the material resources from which these technologies are constructed, become ever more critical to states, corporations, and individuals. Global, national, and local prosperity and peace are inextricably bound with managing risk that arises from supply disruptions of key metal, mineral and other natural resources. In light of the 2008 global financial crisis, many mature economies are interested in refocusing their efforts “on a foundation of substance and not financial, real estate, or dot-com bubbles” (Levine, 2016). Thus, tangible, manufactured technologies including automated machine tools and robots, information technology hardware, new energy vehicles, and solar and wind power equipment whose production rely on specific mineral and metal inputs, are viewed by the United States and China, for example, as being crucial growth industries over the next decade (Lucas and Feng, 2017).

Because of their technological and financial importance to national governments, resources such as cobalt, coltan, lithium, titanium, and rare earths which are widely viewed as essential for advancing key emerging technology industries have at times been referred to as “strategic” (Korinek and Kim, 2010), at other times as “critical” (Massari and Ruberti, 2013) and still at other times as “strategic and critical” (Humphries, 2015). Because these resources pose unique supply constraints (often located in sparsely populated areas: polar regions, deserts, etc.) that may prove detrimental to sustaining global emerging technology industries on which national economic prosperity and political tranquility depend, such strategic materials can be considered as ‘bottleneck resources’. How to account for the unique supply constraints of bottleneck resources is an emerging puzzle governments and political leaders must address in order to keep their economies connected to major global economic trends and processes.

Strategic and critical resources are often the forerunners of tomorrow’s revolutionary technologies, many of which bring power and influence to particular countries (Standage, 2017). As David Brewster, the 19^th century British physicist once said of machines “those mechanical wonders which in one century enriched the conjuror who used them, contributed in another to augment the wealth of a nation” (Brewster in Standage, 2017). This crucial link between technological innovation and national strength continues to be central to harnessing political power at the global scale. Increasingly, access to and control over key bottleneck resources will determine which countries become dominant in the most lucrative emerging technology sectors and, in turn, retain or gain geopolitical influence.

The aim of this session is to grapple with the geopolitics of strategic natural resources from the local to the global scales, and in so doing, the session will attempt to highlight the various strategies employed by geopolitical actors (e.g. China, Japan, Russia, US, UK, South Korea, Brazil) in terms of their willingness to compete and cooperate as each government seeks to gain relevance for playing a leading role in emerging global technology-related industries (e.g. electric battery manufacturing). Both empirical and more theoretical, conceptually-driven papers are encouraged and will be considered. Papers may address any of the following (non-exhaustive) topics:

• The politics of technological development
• The politics of natural resources
• The politics of the emerging economies
• The politics of geo-economic development
• Polar Geography
• China and the Global Economy
• Chinese economic development
• Chinese Geopolitics & Sovereignty
• Geopolitics & Technology
• Governance in the Global Economy
• Natural resource extraction & Sovereignty
• Sovereignty and spaces of exception
• China and International Political Economy
• Natural Resources and Environmental Management

To participate, please send paper titles and abstracts (250 words maximum) to Tom Narins (tnarins@albany.edu). Authors will be notified of paper acceptance on a rolling basis starting on 17 October.

**References**

DeBoom, M.J. 2017. “Nuclear (Geo)Political Ecologies: A Hybrid Geography of Chinese Investment in Namibia’s Uranium Sector.” Journal of Current Chinese Affairs 46, No. 3, 53-83.

Dizard, J. 2017. Lack of ethical cobalt sets Tesla up for a date with reality before its debt matures. The Financial Times. August 12/13, 2017.

Humphries, M. 2015. China’s Mineral Industry and U.S. Access to Strategic and Critical Minerals: Issues for Congress. Congressional Research Service. January 9, 2015.

Klinger, J. 2017. Rare Earth Frontiers. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

Korinek, J. and Kim, J. 2010. “Export Restrictions on Strategic Raw Materials and Their Impact on Trade”, OECD Trade Policy Papers, No. 95, OECD Publishing, Paris. dx.doi.org/10.1787/5kmh8pk441g8-en

Levine, S. 2016. The Powerhouse: America, China and the Great Battery War. New York: Random House.

Lucas, L. and Feng, E. 2017. Remaking China. The Financial Times.  March 20, 2017.

Massari, S. and Ruberti, M. 2013. Rare earth elements as critical raw materials: Focus on international markets and future strategies. Resources Policy 38 (2013) 36–43.

Sanderson, H. 2015. 2015. Material revolution. The Financial Times. December 9, 2015.

Standage, T. 2017. Flights of Fancy. The Economist – 1843. August & September 2017. p. 105.

Deadline: October 20, 2019

This session seeks papers that critically engage with the current attack on political asylum, in the U.S. and in other countries and geographic areas. Topics of interest include related forms of immigration policing, legal efforts to dismantle or undermine migration channels and the asylum process, and the centrality of asylum to the anti-immigrant extremism of the U.S. federal administration, among others.

Scholars have highlighted the inherently biased and exclusionary nature of political asylum, as it reproduces territorialized notions of state power and individual rights (Nyers 2006, Williams 2014) and functions through processes of categorization which hinge on exceptionalism and state defined identity categories deeply rooted in bordering regimes (Jones 2016). In this sense, political asylum and the refugee definition on which it relies exemplify how legal classification systems allow states to maintain control over territory and human mobility even as they claim to abide by international standards (Loyd et al. 2016). Yet asylum has also provided an important mechanism against which to resist exclusionary state practices and the instrumental (dis)regard for human rights to advance geopolitical goals. Indeed, asylum has figured prominently in the current attack on immigrants and refugees in the U.S; a testament to its role in cross border mobility. Today, it is a legal framework upon which many rely, in the hopes of securing legal protection.

Despite seemingly new and unrelenting attempts to dismantle asylum, these practices and policies build on longer histories of exclusion and forms of state violence inherent to detention and deportation, among other forms of bordering. Geographers have theorized the shifting spatiality of borders (Johnson et al 2011), which are externalized through policy and transnational policing (Hiemstra 2019), and internalized through immigration enforcement which feed detention and deportation regimes (Coleman, 2009 ; Hiemstra, 2013 ; Mountz, et al, 2013). Narratives of crisis, alarmism, and criminality justify and expand these operations of state power (Hiemstra and Mountz 2014, Nevins, 2008; Stumpf, 2006, Williams 2017), and increase the mobility of borders as they move with racialized and gendered bodies through space (Casas-Cortes et al 2015).

We invite papers that critically engage with current practices of asylum and immigration policing, including the continuities with and departures from past bordering practices; legal efforts to dismantle or undermine migration channels and asylum seeking; and, the role of asylum in the anti-immigrant extremism of the U.S. federal administration. Questions to investigate in this panel include: How do we make sense of, analyze, or contextualize the current state of asylum? What does activist scholarship look like in the current climate?  How do we maintain a critical posture toward the inherently exclusionary nature of asylum and the forms of exceptionalism on which it relies while resisting the erosion of (the few) protections available for those experiencing forced displacement?  How do scholars critically engage with the politics of categorization and migrant exceptionalism while strategically thinking about international norms as a basis from which to challenge the rise of xenophobia?  Possible paper topics are not limited to but may include:

• Legal geographies of asylum and bordering
• Studying the state and shifting practices of sovereignty
• Methodological approaches to studying core state institutions and institutional dynamics § Spatial practices of deterrence and coerced deportation
• Entanglements of humanitarianism with bordering and exclusion
• Politics of categorization and migrant exceptionalism
• Critical engagement with notions of humanitarianism, crisis, chaos and lawlessness
• Continuities with bordering practices of previous decades and other asylum denying countries
• Deterrence, detention and deportation regimes and the political economies of criminalizing migration
• Activist scholarship in the current political context

 If interested, please submit a 250 word abstract no later than October 20th by emailing the organizers at cynthia.gorman@mail.wvu.edu and leannekp@uga.edu.

References:

Casas-Cortes, M., S. Cobarrubias, and J. Pickles. 2015. Riding Routes and Itinerant Borders:

Autonomy of Migration and Border Externalization. Antipode 47 (4): 894–914.

Hiemstra, Nancy. 2013. “‘You Don’t Even Know Where You Are’: Chaotic Geographies of US Migrant Detention and Deportation.” In Carceral Spaces: Mobility and Agency in Imprisonment and Migrant Detention. Moran, Dominique, Nick Gill, and Deirdre Conlon, eds. Burlington, VT: Ashgate

Hiemstra, N. 2019. Detain and deport : the chaotic U.S. immigration enforcement regime. The University of Georgia Press

Johnson, Corey, Reece Jones, Anssi Paasi, Louise Amoore, Alison Mountz, Mark Salter, and Chris Rumford. 2011. “Interventions on Rethinking ‘the Border’ in Border Studies.” Political Geography 30 (2): 61–69.

Jones, Reece. 2016. Violent Borders: Refugees and the Right to Move. London New York: Verso.

Loyd, J. M. E. Mitchell-Eaton, A. Mountz. The militarization of islands and migration: Tracing human mobility through US bases in the Caribbean and the Pacific Political Geography, 53 (2016), pp. 65-75

Mountz, Alison, and Nancy Hiemstra. 2014. “Chaos and Crisis: Dissecting the Spatiotemporal Logics of Contemporary Migrations and State Practices.” Chaos and Crisis: Dissecting the Spatiotemporal Logics of Contemporary Migrations and State Practices 104 (2): 382–90.

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.

Nevins, Joseph. 2008. Dying to Live. A story of U.S. Immigration in an age of global apartheid. City Lights Books.

Nyers, Peter. 2006. Rethinking Refugees: Beyond States of Emergency. Global Horizons Series. New York: Routledge.

Stumpf, Juliet. 2006. “The Crimmigration Crisis: Immigrants, Crime, and Sovereign Power.” American University Law Review 56 2: 367–419.

Williams, Jill. 2014. “Intervention – ‘The Spatial Paradoxes of “Radical” Activism.'” AntipodeFoundation.Org. January 13, 2014.

Williams, Jill M. 2017. “Crisis, Subjectivity, and the Polymorphous Character of Immigrant Family Detention in the United States.” Territory, Politics, Governance 5 (3): 269–81.

Application Deadline: November 15, 2019

The Department of Geography at the University of Alabama is hiring for a tenure-track faculty position in human geography at the rank of assistant professor whose area of expertise relates to transnational illicit supply networks. Political, economic, and/or human-environment geographers are especially encouraged to apply, employing potentially a diversity of theoretical and methodological approaches. The position will contribute to an emerging cluster of researchers at UA focused on transnational illicit trade/supply networks. Applications are due by November 15^th and full details can be found here:  https://facultyjobs.ua.edu/postings/45791

Deadline: October 16, 2019

Organizers:
Kramer Gillin, University of Wisconsin-Madison & Portland State University
Dr. Corrie Hannah, University of Arizona

Post-socialist, and especially post-Soviet, contexts are underrepresented in geographic scholarship on environmental governance at the scales of individual resource users or resource user groups. Though scholars have conducted important research on environmental governance in post-socialist contexts using diverse approaches–e.g. political ecology, common-pool resource studies, social-ecological systems, institutional economics, resilience, among many others–these approaches have primarily been developed based on empirical research from contexts that are neither post-socialist or post-Soviet. (For example, as of 9/19/19, less than 2 percent of cases from the Digital Library of the Commons contain research from the Former Soviet Union.) As such, these theoretical frameworks’ underlying assumptions, foundational principles, and practical implications may not fully apply to post-socialist contexts. Indeed, we believe that diverse approaches to environmental governance can be improved with theoretical engagements that leverage the unique institutional conditions of the former Soviet Union and other post-socialist contexts.

Recent AAG sessions (“Extracting Eurasia” in 2018 and “Post-Socialist Political Ecologies” in 2019) showcased scholarship on people-environment relations in post-Soviet Eurasia. Last year’s session, in particular, generated exciting but unfinished conversations about the coherence, relevance, and importance of the “post-Soviet” or “post-socialist” context for environmental governance research.
This session seeks to build on these conversations by inviting scholars with diverse research approaches to environmental governance focused on any post-socialist context–including outside of Eurasia–to present context-specific insights that directly critique the broader theoretical frameworks that they have used or encountered in their research. This critique should be the central focus of each presentation. Note that we are specifically NOT looking for the same case study-focused presentation formats that featured in the two AAG sessions mentioned above. Rather, inclusion of empirical case studies should only be used, if at all, as a point of reference or to illustrate examples associated with the theoretical critique that grounds your presentation.

Each presentation should be guided by two tasks, which are not necessarily distinct steps:
1) PROBLEM IDENTIFICATION: Discussion of (a) shortcoming(s) or incompatible logic of a particular environmental governance framework or theory or methodology to post-socialist or post-Soviet contexts. We invite discussions of diverse approaches: political ecology, social-ecological systems, CPR theory, governmentality, resilience, land change science, agent-based modeling, ethnography…it is all welcome!
2) A CONSTRUCTIVE RESPONSE: Suggestion for how studies of post-socialist or post-Soviet contexts can help us build upon, hone, and improve the particular approach to studying environmental governance that you align with, reacting specifically to the problems you identified.

Recognizing the difficulty of the tasks required, we understand that the “constructive response” may be missing or not fully formed in some abstracts submitted this October. This is not necessarily a problem, as long as you are committed to developing the constructive response over the following months. In an academic environment where we may feel marginalized for our regional concentrations, we hope to find ways to leverage our regional focuses as unique strengths that provide inroads for productive engagement with broader theoretical conversations within the disciplines most concerned with environmental governance.

Please send paper titles and abstracts (250 words) to Kramer Gillin (kgillin@wisc.edu) and Dr. Corrie Hannah (corrieh@email.arizona.edu) by Wednesday, October 16th, 2019.  We will respond to all submissions by October 28th.

Deadline: October 23, 2019

Legal geography explores the practice and conceptualization of the law in and via place and space, examining the relationship between law and the changing spatial, social, and environmental conditions that create and contribute to our understanding of the world(s) we inhabit. The Legal Geography Specialty Group of the AAG welcomes all graduate student scholars who pursue research that the involves legal inquiry-whether you consider yourself a ‘spatial detective’ (Bennett 2015), a transdisciplinary/post-disciplinary scholar (Braverman et al. 2014), or are simply interested in the utility of legal geography as a subdiscipline for supporting your work. As legal geographers we study a wide range of topics, including (im)migration, environmental justice, property, resource management, the administration of law in place, law and urban spaces, and much more.

Eligibility: 

Please be a current or prospective master’s or PhD student, with a research focus that involves some form of legal inquiry. We welcome those who have not previously considered their work to be ‘legal geography,’ as well as those who are interested in contributing further to the development of this subfield. To be eligible, you should plan to present your work at this special session at the AAG, Graduate Voices in the Lawscape. 

To submit:
Please send a title and abstract to Alida Cantor (acantor@pdx.edu), Sarah Klosterkamp (s.klosterkamp@wwu.de) and Brittany Wheeler (bwheeler@clarku.edu) by Monday, October 23rd. We will ask for an extended 2-3 page abstract or draft paper to be submitted approximately 1 month before the conference.  If you have any questions about the session, please contact the organizers.

Award/Benefits:
The recipient of the Graduate Voices in the Lawscape award will receive a cash award. The recipient of the award will be announced at the LGSG’s annual meeting (details/date TBD) at the AAG. All participants will receive feedback from other scholars on their work. This is a great chance to network with other early-career scholars as well as more established scholars in the field.

Deadline: November 8th, 2019

Session Description:

Social contract theory dates back to writings of Rousseau, Locke, and Hobbes and, in a newer definition (Loewe et al 2019), refers to “the entirety of explicit or implicit agreements between all relevant societal groups and the sovereign (i.e. government or any other actor in power), defining their rights and obligations towards each other”. Provision, protection and participation offered by the state in exchange for recognition of legitimacy as well as taxes and other obligations constitute processes in which everyone in a society consents to state authority, therefore limiting their personal freedom to easily accessible public goods and services and have state protection for their human rights and security (ibid).

With the dismantling of the welfare state during the neo-liberal era, recent political narratives focused on reframing and realigning the relationship between government and governmental institutions and, thus, the respective contract between citizens and the state (Flint 2015; Goetz 2013; Jacobs and Manzi 2013). As Flint (2015:40) remarks “[h]ousing is a major site of contractual governance […] and therefore a key arena in which the rhetorical and legal realignment of the social contract is occurring.” Yet, the urban geography perspective is widely missing from this debate and especially so when it comes to cities in the MENA region.

Social inequalities and urban unrest have been increasing all over the world (UK: Slater, 2014, 2018; Tyler, 2013). In this sense the uprisings in a number of authoritarian Arab states and the rather local urban protests in Turkey and Iran have been explained as the result of a weakening of the old social contract (Karshenas et al 2014; IMF 2017). Meanwhile, the fear of repression is from time to time overcome. When it comes to social provision, the focus is frequently on employment, health care and food/ energy subsidies (World Bank 2015). We, however, argue that massive urban transformations play a significant role in this.

Therefore, using an urban lens one can argue that the local social contract in many MENA cities is under threat by

• Retreat of the state from social housing and production of an adequate affordable housing stock in central locations
• Gentrification and mega housing projects for elites
• Displacement
• Segregation, marginalization and homelessness

We seek papers that deal with urban transformation in the MENA cities through the perspective of the social contract, and the impact of these on state-society relations (social cohesion) on a local scale.

Papers may address – but are not limited to – the following aspects:

• How the concept of the social contract can be used to explain inequalities in MENA cities
• Problems these urban processes create between the state and the urban population (protests against massive urban projects, stigmatization of certain groups of people in a city during an urban regeneration/renewal project)
• Provision of social services (or the lack thereof) during processes of urban transformation i.e. social housing, municipal/legal services, health care, education
• Withdrawal of state protection (i.e. property rights, use of police force, crime level, landlord harassment, forced evictions, homelessness)
• Recognition of the state’s legitimacy (trust in the state and its institution)
• What can be done to increase social cohesion or strengthen the social contract for cities under scrutiny

If you would like to propose a paper presentation, please send abstracts of up to 250 words to Aysegul Can (aysegul.can87@gmail.com) and Yannick Sudermann (y.sudermann@gmx.de) by Monday, November 8th, 2019

References Cited:

Devarajan, S. and Mottaghi, L. (2015). Towards a new social contract (English). Middle East and North Africa (MENA) Economic Monitor. Washington, DC : World Bank Group.

Goetz, E. (2012). Obsolescence and the Transformation of Public Housing Communities in the US. International Journal of Housing Policy 12 (3): 331–345.

IMF (2017). IMF Research Bulletin, 18(2): 2-5.

Jacobs, K., and T. Manzi. (2013). Modernisation, Marketisation and Housing Reform: The Use of Evidence Based Policy as a Rationality Discourse. People, Place and Policy Online, 7 (1): 1–13.

John F. (2015). Housing and the Realignment of Urban Socio-Spatial Contracts. Housing, Theory and Society, 32(1): 39-53, DOI: 10.1080/14036096.2014.947170.

Karshenas, M., Moghadam, V. M. and Alami, R. (2014). Social Policy after the Arab Spring: States and Social Rights in the MENA Region, World Development, Elsevier, 64(C): 726-739.

Loewe, M., Trautner, B., Zintl, T. (2019). The Social Contract: An Analytical Tool for Countries in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) and Beyond, Briefing Paper, German Development Institute, DOI: 10.23661/bp17.2019.

Slater, T. (2014). The myth of ‘Broken Britain’: Welfare reform and the production of ignorance. Antipode, 46: 948–969.

Slater, T. (2018). The invention of the ‘sink estate’: Consequential categorisation and the UK housing crisis. The Sociological Review, 66(4): 877–897, DOI: 10.1177/0038026118777451.

Tyler, I. (2013). Revolting Subjects: Social Abjection and Resistance in Neoliberal Britain. London : Zed Books.

Discuss Redistricting and Gerrymandering in April of 2020 in Colorado Springs

With the recent Supreme Court decision about partisan gerrymandering devolving the issue to the states and continuing conversations about the health of the democratic process in the United States, we encourage the geography community to take an active role in discussions and redistricting plans at all scales, offering a conference to explore what actions we might take as researchers, academics, and community members.

Here is a link to the conference website: www.uccs.edu/geocivics/conference

The University of Colorado Colorado Springs and Colorado College will host a four-day conversation, with the first two days (April 2-3) devoted to using Colorado as a lens for understanding challenges within a state experiencing demographic growth and changes, examining practical challenges to a fair process.

The subsequent two days (April 4-5), immediately prior to the Denver American Association of Geographers Annual Meeting, will focus on approaches to bridging theory and practice in Colorado and beyond. We will not schedule concurrent sessions as we think all need to hear the same information. We seek presentations on the history of gerrymandering, the role of geospatial technology and mathematical analysis, classroom and community engagement, grassroots efforts (e.g. Voters Not Politicians in Michigan, Draw the Lines PA), serving as expert witnesses, approaches to redistricting in international contexts, and redistricting at scales beyond that of the federal congressional district (e.g. state senate and house districts, county and city governing bodies, school districts, and planning boards). This conference is designed to inform the political parties, bipartisan commissions, the media, and the general public of the geographic and demographic knowledge, political analysis, and computer mapping

If you are interested in attending the pre-conference, please let us know by completing the registration form, indicating whether you are interested in making a presentation or serving on a panel. Additional details about the conference logistics and deadlines will be forthcoming. Here is a link to the registration form: www.uccs.edu/geocivics/form/registration

Stan Brunn, University of Kentucky
Richard Morrill, University of Washington
Rebecca Theobald, University of Colorado Colorado Springs
Beth Malmskog, Colorado College
Sara Hagedorn, University of Colorado Colorado Springs