— CALL FOR PAPERS –
American Association of Geographers (AAG) Annual Meeting, San Francisco, California,
March 29-April 2, 2016
Session title:
Critical geographies of the home(land): (in)security, violence, everyday life
Organizers:
Sara Hughes, UCLA
Maegan Miller, CUNY
Outline of topic/background:
The securitization of everyday life has attracted increasing academic attention in recent years. These processes–exacerbated, but not invented by the events of 9/11–are marked by the intensification and convergence of policing and military apparatuses, surveillance and profiling technologies, urban fortification, and social exclusion that blur meaningful distinctions between spaces of war/peace, foreign/domestic, enemy/civilian. Political geographers have explored these dimensions of “everywhere war” (Gregory 2011) across a range of theoretical and empirical contexts. Jenna Loyd situates the home within uneven militarized and racialized landscapes of war-making and, in doing so, disrupts neat divisions between battle zone and home front (Loyd 2011). William Walters introduces domopolitics: the reconfiguration of relations between citizenship, state, and territory in order to rationalize security measures in the name of a particular conception of home (Walters 2004). Domopolitics are comprised of a series of diagrams including crime, vulnerability, threat, and abuse, technologies of ‘managed’ borders, identity checks and archipelagos of detention–often extending well beyond the ‘homeland.’ Natalie Oswin explores how the two meanings of domestic, as residential shelter and national territory, converge to demarcate belonging within a national ‘family’ according to axes of race, class, nationality, and heteronomativity (Oswin 2011). Stephen Graham highlights the that the demolition of houses and “killing of cities” is a central tactic of modern warfare and occupation (Graham 2004). Setha Low and others examine the spread of gated communities and enclaves in Fortress America (and Fortress Israel, Brazil, etc…) (Low 2001; Rosen & Razin 2008, 2009); and Cindi Katz describes “banal terrorism” as producing a sense of terror and fear, embracing themes of ‘us’ versus ‘them,’ in everyday life (Katz 2007).
Aim of session:
Building upon this work, the aim of this session is to explore discourses of safety in various settings and communities–and all the contradictions they manage/contain–as well as the concrete ways humans in a variety of settings are dealing with risk, insecurity, and uncertainty (Rabinow & Samimian-Darash 2015). We are interested, particularly, with the ways in which war-making shapes domestic/home space and relations. What are the connections between the intimate, everyday spaces of the home and the geopolitical production of a homeland/nation-state? What does safety/security mean in varied contexts? Who gets to feel secure? To ground this discussion empirically, we seek submission of papers (in any stage of development) on the topics of geographies of (in)security, violence, and everyday life in the home(land). We welcome papers that focus on the U.S. as well as papers that explore these dynamics across other national and geopolitical contexts.
Please consider submitting an abstract on any of the following areas (or related areas) within political or cultural geography:
- Geographies of vulnerability, uncertainty, instability, risk, threat
- Ideology, consciousness, affect
- The blurred spatiality of battleground and home front, militarized domesticities (Loyd, 2011)
- Geopolitics of intimacy and domesticity
- Geographies of law and law enforcement
- Dispossession, displacement, settler colonialism and occupation
- Everyday dimensions of policing, securitization, surveillance, and state violence
- Gated communities, enclaves, landscape
- Homelessness and housing crisis
Potential session participants should contact Sara Hughes (saranhughes@ucla.edu ) and Maegan Miller (mmiller5@gradcenter.cuny.edu) by 5 October 2015 to indicate their interest in participating in the session. Please include a proposed title and a 200-word abstract.
Works cited:
Graham, S. (2004). “Lessons in Urbicide.” New Left Review 19
Gregory, D (2011). “The Everywhere War.” The Geographical Journal 117 (3): 238-250
Katz, C. (2007). Banal terrorism. Violent geographies: Fear, terror, and political violence. D. Gregory and A. Pred, Routledge: 349-363.
Katz, C. (2008). “Me and my monkey: What’s hiding in the security state.” Fear: Critical geopolitics and everyday life: 59-72.
Low, S. M. (2001). “The edge and the center: Gated communities and the discourse of urban fear.” American Anthropologist 103(1): 45-58.
Loyd, J. M. (2011). ““Peace is our only shelter”: Questioning domesticities of militarization and white privilege.” Antipode 43(3): 845-873.
Oswin, N (2010). “The Modern Family Model at Home in Singapore: A Queer Geography.” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers. 256-268
Rabinow, P. and L. Samimian-Darash (2015). Modes of Uncertainty: Anthropological Cases, University of Chicago Press.
Rosen, G. and E. Razin (2008). “Enclosed residential neighborhoods in Israel: from landscapes of heritage and frontier enclaves to new gated communities.” Environment and planning. A 40(12): 2895.
Rosen, G. and E. Razin (2009). “The rise of gated communities in Israel: reflections on changing urban governance in a neo-liberal era.” Urban Studies 46(8): 1702-1722.
Walters, W. (2004). “Secure borders, safe haven, domopolitics.” Citizenship studies 8(3): 237-260.