Deadline: November 14, 2019

Paper session:

The Geopolitics of Objects/Heritage/Memory/Aesthetics

Organizers and co-chairs: Jacob C Miller (Department of Geography and Environmental Sciences, Northumbria University, UK) and Sharon Wilson (Northumbria Business School, Northumbria University, UK)

Discussant: Keith Woodward, Department of Geography, University of Wisconsin-Madison

Everyday objects are not innocent. They often contain within them secret powers to invoke, remind, affect, act, impress and otherwise disturb in ways that are often linked to their broader contexts. The geopolitics of objects are often richly networked in spaces of heritage, tourism, ruins, memorial or other explicitly curated aesthetic spaces. In other words, objects can be conceptualized as part of broader material and embodied geographies that are shaped by geopolitical processes. How are geopolitical subjectivities emergent with these material and embodied worlds? Where/how do these overlap, and where/how do they come apart?

We are hoping to attract work from diverse theoretical and methodological perspectives, as long as they relate to these themes somehow. Some topical areas might include:

Everyday militarization

Popular and feminist geopolitics

Geopolitics of tourism and leisure

Post-conflict studies

Aesthetics of power and resistance

Artistic and creative geographies

Public space

Consumption, trash and waste

Infrastructure, architecture and design

Mobility

Migration

Historical geographies and ruins

Hauntology and spectral geographies

We especially encourage contributions that engage with queer, feminist and black geographies, and other critical approaches to race, ethnicity, nation, sex, gender, sexuality, class, capitalism and imperialism, and we welcome submissions that engage with theories of emotion and affect, (post-) phenomenology, new materialism, assemblage theories and psychoanalysis.

We also encourage graduate students and early career academics especially. We will chair the session to ensure it is a safe space for all; aggressive and belligerent behaviour will not be tolerated and offenders will be asked to leave and their behaviour will be reported to the AAG.

Please send your abstracts by November 14 to jacob.miller@northumbria.ac.uk and  Sharon3wilson@northumbria.ac.uk

Deadline: October 4, 2019

Proposal for a session at NESTVAL 2019 (Oct 18-19 in Framingham, MA), and

A special issue of The Northeastern Geographer (Volume 12, 2020)

Quebec Hydropower for a green Massachusetts? Connections, contradictions and contests of electricity

We invite paper proposals for an examination of the connections, contradictions and contests between the drive for low-carbon electricity in southern New England on the one hand, and the development, construction and marketing of hydropower in Quebec, on the other. We are interested in connections defined broadly, across the wide range of connections that may interest geographers, including material infrastructure, policy change, market development, investments and finance, environmental change, social and cultural interactions and transformations including issues of settler colonialism, political contest, and discourse.   Papers should frame their topics within this interconnection but may focus on the connections either a) explicitly between or among different geographical sites, e.g. the impact of Massachusetts policy change on Hydro-Quebec policy; or b) on an individual site within this interconnected system, e.g. the development of Massachusetts low-carbon targets and policies; the development of Hydro-Quebec export marketing policies; the contests over development of a particular Quebec river or a specific proposed transmission line; or the social, cultural and environmental transformation experienced by First Nations before and following a particular hydrodevelopment. Papers may be entirely empirical or more theoretical.

Abstracts for NESTVAL due Oct 4

Abstracts for the special issue due November 15, 2019, for selection by December 1; final papers due May 31, 2020. Publication anticipated December 2020.

Please send abstracts to evev@umass.edu AND negeog@salemstate.edu

Eve Vogel, UMass Amherst, session organizer / issue editor

Steven Silvern, Salem State University; Editor: The Northeastern Geographer

Deadline: October 30, 2019

Eurasian, European, and Political Geography Specialty Groups are excited to co-sponsor a paper session on ethnonationalism entitled “Ethnic Unmixing Remixed: Varieties of Ethnonationalisms Across Central/Eastern Europe and Eurasia.”

Taking Rogers Brubaker’s 1998 paper, “Migrations of Ethnic Unmixing in the ‘New Europe'” as a point of departure, we aim to examine the current state of ethnonationalism – in a multitude of (re)formulations – across Eurasia. Provoked by Brubaker’s definition of ethnic affinity (to a “highly prized homeland”), we are interested in deconstructing ethnonationalism at a variety of scales through diverse scholarly and pedagogical frameworks. Moreover, in the 30 years since the unraveling of the Soviet order in Eastern Europe and Eurasia, the “role of ethnonationalism in the break-up of the Soviet Union” (Cheshko 2005) remains a contentious paradigm for understanding this geopolitically and ecologically critical space.

This proposed session seeks to bring scholars and educators together to investigate who, what, why, how, and where ethnonationalism mobilizes to reproduce exclusion (racial, religious, gender, sexual, linguistic, migratory, political, resource, et al.) across a broad range of territories oriented between Central and Eastern Europe, post-Soviet spaces, and Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region. We encourage contributions from diverse theoretical and methodological perspectives, including contributions which engage with feminist geographies, queer geographies, and critical and empirical approaches to categories which may entangle with ethnonational phenomena (race, religion, identity, class, economic reproduction, and so on). This session might address the following questions and topics:

• Perspectives on ethnonationalism in Eastern Europe and Eurasia in 1990 vs. 2020;

• The role of everyday, embodied affective nationalism (Militz and Schurr 2016; Antonsich and Skey 2017) and affective-discursive practices (Breeze 2018; Wetherell 2015; 2013), such as media representations of an “emotional nation” (McConville, McCreanor, Wetherell, et al. 2017);

• Paraphrasing Tara Zahra (2010), is national indifference a useful category of analysis for researchers?

• Explorations of transnational imaginaries and relationalities of regimes of mobility (Salazar and Schiller 2016) and repertoires of migration (Siegelbaum and Moch 2015), as well as diasporas and ‘beached’ minorities (Kolstø 1995);

• Border theory as well as cognitive (b)ordering and linguistic geographies of ethnicities and nationalism(s), including place names, linguistic landscapes, language policy, et cetera;

• Literacy, knowledge, learning experiences and constitutive discourses of ethnonationalism in pedagogical encounters (classrooms, textbooks, et al.) and their meanings vis-à-vis identities and embodied experiences (Erdreich and Rapoport 2002);

• Ethnoscapes (Smith 1999) as catalysts in the destruction or “recovery of memory” through public commemorative ceremonies (Zhurzhenko 2014);

• LGBTQ+ activism, sexual citizenship, and resistances to / consocialities with ethnonational politics (Buyantueva and Shevtsova 2020);

• Social/protest movements, activism, and (post)imperial and (post)Soviet reimaginings of ethnic or multiethnic spaces – via GIS, critical and historical cartography, etc. (Seegel 2014);

• (De)escalations of ethnonationalism and violence, crackdowns, ethnic cleansing, and irredentism (Holland, Witmer, and O’Loughlin 2017);

• “Dreaming the global” (Franklin 2019) in Eurasia – explorations of development, identities and imaginaries along the Silk Road and China’s Belt and Road Initiative;

• Strategies against, resistances to, and critiques of ethnonationalism, including as a theoretical/research paradigm and political practice in academic studies (Tishkov 1992);

This is envisioned as a paper session, however, given the interdisciplinary framework of this CfP and the broad geographies under consideration, a discussant may be included; I aim to be as flexible as possible. Please send your title, abstract, and PIN to james.eugene.baker@huskers.unl.edu by October 30th if you would like to be included. October 30th is the date by which all abstracts must be submitted for inclusion in the 2020 AAG Annual Meeting. As sessions must be organized by November 20th, I will follow up with you no later than this deadline.

James E. Baker
james.eugene.baker@huskers.unl.edu
Graduate Student Representative / Student Board Member, European and Eurasian Specialty Groups
Department of Geography
University of Nebraska – Lincoln

References:
Antonsich, M., & Skey, M. (2017). Affective nationalism: Issues of power, agency and method. Progress in Human Geography, 41(6), 843-845.

Breeze, R. (2019). Emotion in politics: Affective-discursive practices in UKIP and Labour. Discourse & Society, 30(1), 24-43.

Brubaker, R. (1998). Migrations of ethnic unmixing in the “New Europe”. International Migration Review, 32(4), 1047-1065.

Buyantueva, R. & M. Shevtsova (2020). LGBTQ+ Activism in Central and Eastern Europe. Palgrave Macmillan.

Cheshko, S. V. (2005). Роль этнонационализма в распаде СССР [The Role of Ethnonationalism in the Break-up of the Soviet Union]. In Трагедия Великой Державы[Tragedy of a Mighty Power], edited by G. N. Sevostyanov, 443-468.

Erdreich, L., & Rapoport, T. (2002). Elaborating ethnonational awareness via academic literacy: Palestinian Israeli women at the university.
Anthropology & education quarterly, 33(4), 492-515.

Franklin, K. 2019. Caucasia on the Silk Roads: Situating Global Cultures in Local Histories. Paper presented at Teaching the South Caucasus: A Workshop for College and University Educators, Russian, East European, and Eurasian Center at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Holland, E. C., Witmer, F. D., & O’Loughlin, J. (2017). The decline and shifting geography of violence in Russia’s North Caucasus, 2010-2016. Eurasian Geography and Economics, 58(6), 613-641.

Kolstø, P., & Edemsky, A. (1995). Russians in the former Soviet republics. Indiana University Press.

McConville, A., McCreanor, T., Wetherell, M., & Moewaka Barnes, H. (2017). Imagining an emotional nation: the print media and Anzac Day commemorations in Aotearoa New Zealand. Media, Culture & Society, 39(1), 94-110.

Militz, E., & Schurr, C. (2016). Affective nationalism: Banalities of belonging in Azerbaijan. Political Geography, 54, 54-63.

Salazar, N. B., & Schiller, N. G. (Eds.). (2016). Regimes of mobility: Imaginaries and relationalities of power. Routledge.

Seegel, S. (2016). Geography, identity, nationality: mental maps of contested Russian–Ukrainian borderlands. Nationalities Papers, 44(3), 473-487.

Siegelbaum, L. H., & Moch, L. P. (2015). Broad Is My Native Land: Repertoires and Regimes of Migration in Russia’s Twentieth Century. Cornell University Press.

Smith, A. D. (1999). Myths and Memories of the Nation (Vol. 288). Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Tishkov, V.A. (1992) Inventions and Manifestations of Ethno-Nationalism in and after the Soviet Union. In: Rupesinghe K., King P., Vorkunova O. (eds). Ethnicity and Conflict in a Post-Communist World. London: Palgrave Macmillan.

Wetherell, M. (2013). Affect and discourse–What’s the problem? From affect as excess to affective/discursive practice. Subjectivity, 6(4), 349-368.

Wetherell, M. (2015). Tears, Bubbles and Disappointment-New Approaches for the Analysis of Affective-Discursive Practices: A Commentary on “Researching the Psychosocial”. Qualitative Research in Psychology, 12(1), 83-90.

Zahra, T. (2010). Imagined noncommunities: National indifference as a category of analysis. Slavic Review, 69(1), 93-119.

Zhurzhenko, T. (2014). The border as pain and remedy: commemorating the Polish–Ukrainian conflict of 1918-1919 in Lviv and Przemyśl. Nationalities Papers, 42(2), 242-268.

This session explores the emerging dynamics and outcomes of growing US immigration enforcement throughout the Americas.

US immigration and border enforcement policies and actions continue to grow increasingly expansive, restrictive, and punitive under the political resurgence of US white nationalism and nativism. This approach includes a marked expansion of enforcement into new spaces in the Americas through initiatives like Programa Frontera Sur in Mexico and Guatemala’s “Safe Third-Country” Agreement, which effectively outsource immigrant policing to countries of transit and departure. And yet, undocumented immigration to the US from Latin America continues largely unabated, as households and communities contend with a range of entrenched and emerging challenges, including insecurity and (gendered and racialized) violence, economic marginalization, dispossession, extractivist projects, corruption, climate change and environmental degradation, and political repression.

While both US immigration enforcement and immigration from (and within) the Americas have a lengthy, entangled history, we currently lack a comprehensive understanding of the scope of enforcement’s emerging “footprint” in the region, and how (or whether) this footprint is changing immigration dynamics, experiences, livelihoods, and landscapes. This session accordingly invites papers exploring the following themes from throughout the Americas as they relate to expanded enforcement:

• Immigration strategies and lived experiences
• Political economies of immigration, smuggling, and the illicit
• Expanded spaces and practices of immigration policing (de jure and/or de facto)
• Post-enforcement (detention, deportation, and/or death) realities
• Discourses and meanings around immigration and enforcement
• Social dynamics (race, gender, and class) in sending and destination areas
• Shifting landscapes in areas of origin, transit, and destination
• Community responses (mediation) of enforcement hardships

Please submit contact information and paper abstracts (250 words maximum) to Richard Johnson (rljohnson@email.arizona.edu) and Dr. Lindsey Carte (lindsey.carte@ufrontera.cl) by no later than October 25 for consideration. Please feel free to contact the organizers with any questions or alternative suggestions.

Políticas Anti-migratorias en las Américas

En la presente sesión se discutirá las dinámicas y consecuencias emergentes del entorno actual de las migraciones indocumentadas en las Américas.

Las políticas anti-migratorias de los Estados Unidos continúan en aumento y consisten en políticas restrictivas y punitivas cada vez más severas como consecuencia del resurgimiento del nacionalismo xenófobo en ese país. Simultáneamente, la aplicación de estas políticas migratorias se ha extendido a nuevos espacios a lo largo del continente americano a través de iniciativas como el Programa Frontera Sur en México y la firma del acuerdo Tercer País Seguro en Guatemala. Estos acuerdos externalizan la responsabilidad del control migratorio a países de transito e incluso expulsores de migrantes. Sin embargo, la inmigración indocumentada hacia los EE. UU. sigue sin disminuir de manera significativa, mientras los hogares y comunidades de origen enfrentan varios retos crónicos y nuevos, incluyendo inseguridad y la violencia (de género y étnica), marginación económica, despojo de tierras, extractivismo, corrupción, cambio climático, degradación medioambiental, y represión política.

La política anti-migratoria de los Estados Unidos y la migración indocumentada desde (y dentro) de las Américas tiene una historia larga y compleja. Sin embargo, hace falta comprender las consecuencias del incremento de la “huella” estadounidense en las políticas regionales de restricción migratoria y control fronterizo, y cómo estos nuevos espacios cambian las dinámicas y experiencias de la migración, y los medios de vida y los paisajes en los lugares de origen. Por lo tanto, invitamos a investigadores que exploren los siguientes temas y su relación con la expansión y profundización de políticas anti-migratorias en las Américas:

• Estrategias y experiencias de inmigración
• Economía política de inmigración, la trata de personas, y lo ilícito
• El aumento de espacios de control migratorio
• Realidades “post-fracaso” (detención, deportación, muerte)
• Discursos cambiantes sobre inmigración y aplicación de políticas anti-migratorias
• Dinámicas sociales (de etnia, género, y clase) en lugares de origen y destino
• Cambio agrario y de paisaje
• Manejo comunitario de las consecuencias del “fracaso” migratorio

Se recibirá resúmenes (de un máximo de 250 palabras) hasta el 25 de octubre. Por favor enviar trabajos a Richard Johnson (rljohnson@email.arizona.edu) y Dra. Lindsey Carte (lindsey.carte@ufrontera.cl) para su consideración.

Session Description:

At the same time that global poverty rates have made drastic declines and the global middle class has grown enormously, inequality within many countries has risen. New geographies of prosperity and opportunity appear to be related to skepticism toward global economic and cultural integration as well as populist politics throughout the world. While the United States has been one of the most visible examples of this shift, it appears to be a global phenomenon.

Global inequality is increasingly defined not only by differences between countries but also by those within them. The shifting dynamics of interpersonal inequality have distinct spatial manifestations within countries (inter-regionally) as well as within city regions (intra-regionally). Spatial inequality also appears to be related to political, cultural and social polarization, as well as disparities in equality of opportunity.

Economic geographers, among other social scientists, have made important contributions to our understanding of the dynamics of inequality in recent years, yet we believe there is much more to contribute by broadening our perspective and incorporating complementary views from fields like population, urban and political geography as well as neighboring disciplines such as economics, international business and political science. It is our goal in these sessions to integrate these perspectives with a global lens. In particular, we are interested in developing discussion and debate that help us push our understanding of the dynamics of intra- and inter-regional inequality further. Potential topics include:

• How have intra- and inter-regional economic inequality evolved over time?
• What forces contribute to intra- and inter-regional economic inequality?
• How is economic inequality related to social, cultural or political polarization in spatial perspective?
• How does regional inequality vary along demographic axes such as gender, race, citizenship or others?
• How do new geographical expressions of inequality challenge extant theory and policy? How and why do the forces that drive inequality differ geographically?
• How do economic networks and institutions affect inter- and intra-regional inequality?
• What role can policy play in mitigating intra- and inter-regional economic inequality? And what kind of policies are needed?

We particularly welcome contributions that compare the dynamics of intra- and inter-regional inequality across countries or that focus on places outside North America and Western Europe. Subject to the quantity and quality of presentations, the organizers intend to develop a special issue in an established journal from the sessions.

If you are interested in participating in this discussion with a paper presentation please submit an abstract to Harald Bathelt (harald.bathelt@utoronto.ca), Maximilian Buchholz (max.buchholz@mail.utoronto.ca) and Michael Storper (m.storper@lse.ac.uk) for consideration.

While geographers have addressed the materiality of infrastructures, we know markedly less about their sociality and how they become enrolled in geopolitical discourse and practice. Human geographers’ recent work demonstrates how the development of roads, dams, grids, canals, and other infrastructural things can serve, on the one hand, as diplomatic vehicles of cooperation and resolution and, on the other, as drivers of conflict and distantiation (Jones 2012; Akhter 2019). Frequently enacted as a broader state-building exercise (Meehan, 2014; Murton, 2017), infrastructural developments can engender a range of political responses. For instance, while failed infrastructures frequently threaten national and inter-state governance (Anand, 2015; Millington, 2018), successful developments can drive new geoeconomic patterns and hegemonic processes between states and citizenries.

Examining the ways in which international commitments to infrastructural investment and construction are leveraged to advance specific geopolitical interests, this panel considers infrastructures as material and symbolic entities that both take shape within and simultaneously shape broader political geographies. In their symbolic form, infrastructures reflect the ideals of progress, however unevenly distributed (Anand, Gupta, & Appel, 2018). In their material form, infrastructures produce new matter that shapes spaces of inclusion and exclusion (Bennett, 2010; Björkman, 2015). The symbolic and material coproduction of infrastructures thereby enables a political economy of governance that can perpetuate ongoing inequalities, set new terms of mobility and containment, trigger the circulation of complex and uncertain narratives, and foster widespread hope as well as anxiety among populations across scales (Carse & Kneas, 2019).

Papers in this panel will draw on the sociality of infrastructure (Amin 2014; Simone 2004) and trans-local conditions of international development to push forward emerging work on the geopolitics of infrastructure in a diversity of geographic and cultural contexts[i]. Possible paper topics may include, but are not limited to:

• Infrastructure diplomacy
• The sociality of infrastructure
• Infrastructural temporalities
• Infrastructural asymmetries
• South/South infrastructure development
• Environmental geopolitics of infrastructure
• Infrastructure and uneven development
• Failed infrastructure
• The materiality of infrastructure
• Infrastructure and political ecologies of the state
• Infrastructure and nation-building
• Geopolitics/geoeconomics of global infrastructure development
• Geopolitics of energy infrastructure
• Infrastructure and global security
• Infrastructure and disaster

Please send paper titles and abstracts (250 words maximum) to Galen Murton, James Madison University (murtongb@jmu.edu) and Mary Mostafanezhad, University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa (mostafan@hawaii.edu). We will notify authors of paper acceptance on a rolling basis starting October 5th.

Bibliography:

Akhter, M. (2019). Adjudicating infrastructure: Treaties, territories, hydropolitics. Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space

Anand, N., Gupta, A., & Appel, H. (Eds.). (2018). The promise of infrastructure. Durham: Duke University Press.

Anand, N (2015) Leaky states: Water audits, ignorance, and the politics of infrastructure. Public Culture, 27(2): 305-330.

Amin, A. (2014). Lively infrastructure. Theory, Culture & Society 31(7-8): 137-161.

Bennet, J. (2010). Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Durham: Duke University Press.

Björkman, L. (2015). Pipe politics, contested waters: Embedded infrastructures of millennial Mumbai. Durham: Duke University Press.

Carse, A., & Kneas, D. (2019). Unbuilt and Unfinished: The Temporalities of Infrastructure. Environment and Society, 10(1), 9-28.

Jones, R. (2012). Border Walls: Security and the War on Terror in the United States, India, and Israel. London: Zed Books.

Meehan, K. (2014). Tool-power: Water infrastructure as wellsprings of state power. Geoforum 57: 215-224.

Millington, N. (2018). Producing water scarcity in São Paulo, Brazil: The 2014-2015 water crisis and the binding politics of infrastructure. Political Geography, 65, 26-34.

Murton, Galen. (2017). “Making mountain places into state spaces: Infrastructure, consumption, and territorial practice in a Himalayan borderland.” Annals of the American Association of Geographers 107(2): 536–45.

Rankin, K. N., Nightingale, A. J., Hamal, P., & Sigdel, T. S. (2018). Roads of change: political transition and state formation in Nepal’s agrarian districts. The Journal of Peasant Studies, 45(2), 280-299.

Simone, A. (2004). People as infrastructure: intersecting fragments in Johannesburg. Public Culture, 16(3), 407-429.

[i] While scholars have paid significant attention to China as a key actor in contemporary infrastructural geopolitics, this panel deliberately aims to expand the conversation beyond China, the BRI, and Beijing’s role as builder and financier of international infrastructures.

Organizers: Jessie Clark (University of Nevada, Reno) & Lauren Fritzsche (University of Arizona)

Discussant: Lise Nelson (University of Arizona)

Deadline for abstracts: October 18, 2019

 This session critically examines the role of place and place-making in new geographies of refugee resettlement and immigration. Today, longstanding refugee and immigration policies and commitments are dramatically changing in the Global North, and they reflect and shape a new geography of where and how people are settling. Amidst these changes, geographers are seeking to understand how places are important sites of policy-making and negotiation over belonging, race/racialization, and identity in the context of resettlement and immigration. Places are not passive recipients of broader policies or rhetoric; they are the “locus” (Massey, 1994) where global and national flows meet the “sociohistorical legacies of localities” (Matos, 2017) in the welcome or exclusion of people. We are interested in papers that explore the experience of refugees, immigrants, and receiving communities through the lens of place to understand how characteristics of place and socio-economic, racial, and political histories interact with processes of settlement and resettlement. We seek papers that address but are not limited to the following:

• The processes and practices of refugee and immigrant settlement in new and non-traditional destinations
• Everyday and embodied experiences of refugees and immigrants in new and non traditional destinations
• Racist and anti-racist practices in place and impacts of place-based legacies of racism on the settlement process and experience
• Negotiations of immigrant and refugee belonging, inclusion, and/or exclusion in place
• Place-based policies, initiatives, and responses to refugee and immigrant settlement
• Place-based negotiations with infrastructural and financial disinvestment in resettlement and immigration resources

Submission of abstracts: Please email enquiries and abstracts (250 words) to Jessie Clark (jessieclark@unr.edu) and Lauren Fritzsche (fritzsche@email.arizona.edu) by October 18. Authors will be notified by October 25, and must register for the conference and submit their abstracts through the AAG website by the October 30 deadline to be added to the paper session.

Massey, D. B. (1994). Space, place, and gender. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Matos, Y. (2017). Geographies of Exclusion: The Importance of Racial Legacies in Examining State-Level Immigration Laws. American Behavioral Scientist, 61(8), 808–831. doi.org/10.1177/0002764217720480