Category Archives: ANNOUNCEMENTS

CFP AAG 2016: Session Title: Star Trek and Geography: Boldly exploring representation and affect in popular culture across space and time

Call for Participation: AAG 2016

Session Title: Star Trek and Geography:  Boldly exploring representation and affect in popular culture across space and time

Session Description:
San Francisco serves as both the site of the 2016 Annual Meeting of the Association of American Geographers and the fictional headquarters and charter site of Star Trek’s United Federation of Planets and Starfleet Headquarters. This panel session, building off of the impressive developments of last year’s Doctor Who panel, will continue to expand the society’s exploration of the integration of popular culture and geographical understanding. Star Trek can and has been utilized in many instances as a reflection of broader geographical problems, concepts, and trends, but there are also the geographical implications of Star Trek and the spatial and philosophical impact the franchise’s six series, twelve movies, and plethora of literature, conventions, and merchandising have had internationally.

The topics that will be discussed in this panel range from popular geopolitics and the reflections of current events in Star Trek, to critical race theory and the dialogue of African American and Indigenous rights, and to political ecology and various critical dialogues of nature, humanity, and environmentalism.

We welcome geographers who would be willing to further extend and elaborate on the very wide ranging topic of the geographies of Star Trek, and hope, by doing so, will stimulate further dialogue both within the panel and from the audience.

If you are interested in being a part of this panel, please contact Mark Rhodes at mrhode21@kent.edu

Organizers:
Mark Rhodes (Kent State University)
Fiona Davidson, PhD (University of Arkansas)
Hannah Gunderman (University of Tennessee, Knoxville)

Sponsorship:

Communication Geography Specialty Group

Cultural Geography Specialty Group

Political Geography Specialty Group

*Extended deadline* CFP AAG 2016: The European Migration Crisis

*Extended deadline*

Call for Papers: AAG 2016 San Francisco, CA 

Title: The European Migration Crisis

Photographs, interviews and news reports covering the rising number of international migrants who are arriving along the European Union’s border or have died trying to reach Europe are now ubiquitous. This recent and unprecedented increase in the number of migrants destined for Europe is so startling it has been identified as a migration “crisis”. While internally the European Union’s Schengen common border agreement purports freedom of movement for its citizens, international migrants arriving at the border face numerous challenges and the European Union has increased spending for its border patrol operations since April 2015. Discrepancies between various member-states responses’ to migrants and their willingness to accept asylum applications complicate matters further.

The aim of this session is to critically examine this migration from a theoretical and/or empirical perspective. We are interested in investigating a variety of factors surrounding this crisis including conflicts at the EU border, local and/or national responses (e.g. resistance or support for migrants), and media portrayal of the crisis. In this CFP, we invite papers that investigate the aforementioned topics as well as topics including, but not limited to:

  • Contestation surrounding EU or member-state regulations governing migration and refugee status, including external pressure on EU member-states to accept refugees
  • Conflicts at borders and challenges faced by both migrants and receiving member-states
  • Policies or beliefs (real or mistaken) that make certain member-states more desirable destinations than other EU member-states for migrants
  • Investigation of geographic tropes, discourse(s) and global imaginaries that contribute to perceptions of this surge of migrants as a “crisis”
  • Motivating factors that are driving many of these migrants out of their homeland

This session is sponsored by the Political Geography and European Specialty Groups. Reece Jones will serve as discussant for this session. Please send proposed titles and abstracts of no more than 250 words by email to Kara Dempsey (dempseyke@appstate.edu) by Monday, October 19th, 2015.

2nd CFP AAG 2016: Fulfilling The Promise of Anarchist Geographies

2nd Call for Papers – Association of American Geographers Conference 2016, San Francisco, 29 March – 2 April 2016
Fulfilling The Promise of Anarchist Geographies 
Organizers
Ant Ince (Cardiff University)
Simon Springer (University of Victoria)
Nathan Clough (University of Minnesota Duluth)
Richard J White (Sheffield Hallam University)
Patricia Wood (York University)
Vanessa Sloan Morgan (Queen’s University)
Marcelo Lopes de Souza (Federal University of Rio de Janeiro)
Outline
The re-emergence of anarchist perspectives has been one of the most significant new developments in critical geography over the last few years. Two journal special issues in 2012 (Clough and Blumberg 2012; Springer et al. 2012) galvanised a diverse set of anarchist- inspired geographers and set the scene for a range of scholarship to emerge, including studies of non-capitalist economies (Ince 2015; White 2013), historical geographies (Ferretti 2013; 2014), political praxis (Curran and Gibson 2013), neoliberalism (Springer 2013), the state (Ince and Barrera forthcoming), governance (Gorostiza et al. 2013; Wilkin and Boudeau 2015), postcoloniality/decoloniality (Barker 2013), urbanism (Lopes de Sousa 2014), and a reassessment of our discipline’s radical potential (Springer 2016), among others.
New ideas and concepts have emerged through this renewed interest in anarchism, which promises to transform the intellectual landscape of geography as we know it. This growing maturity and diversity of anarchist thought, however, has been characterized by a heavy focus on theory. As scholars identifying with anarchist traditions, we feel it is both timely and vitally important to explore critically and in greater depth what these theoretical and conceptual innovations mean for academic praxis – in the empirical, as well as pedagogical and methodological, dimensions of geographical scholarship.
We therefore invite empirically grounded research presentations that utilize anarchist and left-libertarian frameworks, addressing themes including but not limited to:
• Colonialism, postcolonialism, and decolonization
• Economic geographies and sharing economies
• Post-humanist, more-than-human, and critical animal geographies
• Gender and feminisms
• Queer geographies and sexuality
• Authority, power, and the state
• Pedagogy, learning, and teaching
• Social movements, publics, and collective agency
• Mobilities, migration, and multicultural societies
• Critical geopolitics, anti-geopolitics, and alter-geopolitics
• The politics of everyday life and prefiguration
• Cooperation and the practice of mutual aid
• The commons and communing
• Intersectionality and identity
We also welcome presentations in non-traditional and participatory formats. Also, if you would like to participate in other ways (e.g. discussant) then please feel free to contact us as well.
Please send abstracts of no more than 250 words to InceA@cardiff.ac.uk, springer@uvic.ca, and clou0062@umn.edu by 23 October 2015.
Please note: Once you have submitted an abstract to us and it is accepted, you will also need to register AND submit an abstract on the AAG website. The AAG abstract deadline is 29 October 2015:
http://www.aag.org/cs/http://www.aag.org/cs/annualmeeting/how_to_submit_an_abstract

 

CFP AAG 2016: Transnationalizing Migration Management?

CFP AAG 2016: Transnationalizing Migration Management?   

AAG annual meeting, San Francisco, March 29 – April 2, 2016

Organizers

Malene H. Jacobsen and Leif Johnson (University of Kentucky)

Session Overview

Although international migration by its very nature involves flows across territorial borders, the geographical imagination of migration management remains thoroughly embedded within the nation-state. Building on the recent work of Mountz & Loyd (2014) and Collyer & King (2015), this session asks the question of what it means to theorize migration management through a transnational lens. This session is aimed broadly at scholars interested in spaces of bordering and migration management practices in the context of cross border governance. We invite submissions that explore the spatial aspects of migration management across different scales.

The session seeks to engage in the following questions but is also open to others: How do national/transnational understandings of migration management differ and/or converge? How is the concept of transnationalism related to other concepts in migration studies like the international, (im)mobility, flows, networks, globalization, extraterritoriality, offshoring, assemblage, etc.? To what extent is the transnationalization of migration management a historically novel trend/phenomenon? How is the phenomenon related to changes within the nation-state itself or other forces (market pressures, neoliberalization, etc.)? How can transnational migration management practices/strategies be studied empirically and unpacked conceptually? What kinds of political possibilities does the transnationalization of migration management enable or foreclose?

Possible empirical topics might include:

  • The spatiality of borders and migration management
  • Geographies of the institutions and agencies engaged in transnational migration management
  • The roles of international agencies and humanitarian organizations in controlling/facilitating mobility
  • Cross-border policing and policies
  • Bi- and multilateral agreements between countries
  • Socioeconomic development in border regions
  • The role of development aid in migration management
  • Migration management as an area of expertise, intervention, and specialist domain of knowledge, logics, personnel, methods, and politics
  • The humanitarian-migration management nexus
  • Managerial practices such as refugee resettlement, deterrence, confinement, deportation, and ‘voluntary’ return

Please send abstracts of up to 250 words to Malene H. Jacobsen (malene.jacobsen@uky.edu) and Leif Johnson (leif.johnson@uky.edu) by Monday, October 19th, 2015. Selected abstracts will be accepted by October 21st. All participants must provide AAG PINs by October 28th.

CFP AAG 2016: Hipster Geographies: Socio-spatial practices, politics, and economies of one of culture’s most maligned figures

Final Call for Papers: AAG 2016 (San Francisco, CA)
Hipster Geographies: Socio-spatial practices, politics, and economies of one of culture’s most maligned figures.
 
Organizers: Ryan Burns, Temple University; Cristina Temenos, Northeastern University; Jesse McClelland, University of Washington.
 
Both hailed and maligned, the figure of the ‘hipster’ plays a prominent role in the administration, spatial configuration, and narration of consumption in contemporary cities. The hipster has been blamed for many social ills in popular discourse including gentrification, the dissolution of political activism, and the expression of race and class privilege (Cowen 2006, Rayner 2010, Oluo 2010). Yet just what the hipster is remains loosely mapped and poorly articulated. Though some have already pronounced the death of the hipster (Greif et al. 2010), it continues to haunt urban imaginaries, akin to ‘chavs’, ‘dandies’, ‘welfare queens’, ‘yuppies’ or other figures of urban lore.
By deflecting attention from the structural forces and struggles around injustice and naturalizing a state of ironic detachment, the figure of the hipster may help to depoliticize the workings of capitalist urban governance. These workings include economic incentives designed to promote specific kinds of consumption (Barry 2013) and differential policing of racialized, classed, and gendered bodies and behaviors (Smith 2014) – many of which Neil Smith (1996) identified as the new drivers of gentrification. In this sense, the hipster is at once thought to be conferring ‘new’ energies and possibilities on urban spaces, while ratifying decades-long tendencies of commodification and dispossession. Some even trace the hipster’s origins back to the Antebellum U.S. South (Leland 2001). On the other hand, the hipster’s positioning within current digital and creative economies indicates new political-economic transformations (McWilliams 2015, Omidi 2014). Further, some scholarly accounts have suggested that the hipster is less a figure than a new sociology and cultural force with unknown implications (Greif, Ross, Tortorici 2010; Schiermer 2014).
The figure of the hipster remains remarkably nebulous and its spatialities, political-economic transformations, and cultural significance remain underexplored, particularly from a perspective that prioritizes its geographic conditions. This session calls for papers addressing these gaps and contributing to geographers’ theoretical and empirical understanding of the ordering of cities today. Along these lines, papers could address the following issues, and more:
  • What forms has the hipster taken in diverse contexts, locally and globally, and how have these geographic specificities led to distinct implications and impacts?
  • What are the politics of the hipster – its formulation, its influence on activism, its injection into the political arena, or its depoliticization of urban social and economic transformations?
  • How is the hipster imbricated in economic and cultural geographies? Of urban geographies of gentrification, housing, labor markets?
  • How does the hipster mediate broader understandings of youth cultures, queer cultures, transnational cultures and others?
  • How does the hipster assist in broader processes of appropriation, production and consumption (whether of sport, fashion, food, home, public/private divides)?
  • How does the hipster synergize with either new technological transformations or craft/traditional/DIY practices?
  • How might the hipster disrupt or reinforce social orderings, such as racism, classism, sexism, and heteronormativity?
Please send abstracts of no more than 250 words to Ryan Burns (ryan.burns@temple.edu), Cristina Temenos (c.temenos@neu.edu), and Jesse McClelland (jmcclell@uw.edu) by October 10.
Information about conference fees, registration, etc can be found at: http://www.aag.org/cs/annualmeeting
References: 
Barry, D. (2013). So Hipsters Aren’t The Economic Boon Some Urbanists Thought They’d Be. Jezebel. March 13, 2013
Cowen, D. (2006). Hipster urbanism. Relay: A Socialist Project Review 13: 22-23.
Greif, M., K. Ross, D. Tortorici (2010). What Was the Hipster? A Sociological Investigation. New York: n+1 Foundation.
Leland, John (2001). Hip: The History. New York: Harper Perennial.
McWilliams, D. (2015). The Flat White Economy: How the Digital Economy is Transforming London and Other Cities of the Future. New York: Duckworth Overlook.
Oluo, I. (2015). Uncomfortable Fact: Hipster Racism is Often Well-Intentioned. The Guardian. Feb 13, 2015.
Rayner, A. (2010). Why do people hate hipsters? The Guardian. Oct 14, 2010
Schiermer, B. (2014). Late-modern hipsters New tendencies in popular culture. Acta Sociologica, 57(2), 167-181.
Smith, C.B.R. (2014). Harm Reduction Hipsters: Socio-Spatial-Political Displacement and the Gentrification of Public Health. In Nadya S. Columbus (Ed.) Harm Reduction: Principles, Perceptions and Programs. Hauppauge, NY: Nova Science Publishers, Ltd.
Smith, N. (1996). The New Urban Frontier: Gentrification and the Revanchist City. New York: Routledge.

CFP AAG 2016: Geographies of conflict, contestation, and coalescence

Session Title: Geographies of conflict, contestation, and coalescence

Organizers:

Sarah Heck, PhD student, Department of Geography and Urban Studies, Temple University

Peter Wood, PhD candidate, Department of Geography, Florida State University

Sponsoring specialty groups:

Political Geography, Latin America, Development Geographies, Geographic Perspectives on Women

Description:

This session aims to draw attention to the geographic circumstances under which conflict and cooperation occur at various scales. The reasons for conflict, both contemporarily and historically, can vary greatly. With this session we aim to bring together a diverse collection of scholarship analyzing contexts in which social conflict shapes and is shaped by geographic factors. We are interested in work that examines spatial dimensions of conflict, contestation, and coalescence, including the roles of place, space, (im)mobility, networks, scale, borders, and territory as well as the roles of social categories such as race, gender, ethnicity, sexuality, ability, and religion. The proposed session intends to address the roles of both state actors and grassroots mobilizations in the genesis and continuity of regimes of conflict. We are also interested in how unexpected coalitions and forms of cooperation happen in the context of conflict and contestation along lines of difference.

Within geography the topics of conflict and cooperation take many forms and are inspired by many theoretical backgrounds. Past examples have focused on socioeconomic equality–within a territory (Merrifield and Swyngedouw 1997) or between countries/regions (Landes 1998)–war (Flint 2005), social movements (Bosco 2004), and other related topics. A goal of this session is to bring together a multitude of perspectives in order to explore the many ways in which conflict arises, is sustained, is contested, or is resolved. Examples appropriate for submission include, but are not limited to:

Geographies of difference

Geographies of displacement

Gentrification

The production of space and the right to the city

Feminist approaches to understanding violence and conflict

Immigration policy and practice

Geographies of microaggressions

Dispossession of living and working spaces

Unlikely geopolitical partnerships

Histories of ethnoreligious turmoil

Urban grassroots mobilizations and protest spaces

Urban versus rural labor economies

Street gang rivalries and alliances

Perceptions and misperceptions of regional identity

Both empirical and theoretical contributions are welcome. If you have any questions or concerns regarding a paper idea, please feel free to contact the session organizers.

Instructions for submissions:

Interested participants should send a 250 word abstract and conference PIN to Sarah Heck (sarah.heck@temple.edu) and Peter Wood (pwood@fsu.edu) by October 16th, 2015.

UCL – Postdoctoral Researcher openings

2 x Postdoctoral researcher vacancies

UNIVERSITY COLLEGE LONDON

The UCL City Leadership Initiative, a joint effort of UN-Habitat, University College London and World Bank based at UCL STEaPP, is now recruiting two postdoctoral researchers to join its growing team. Two posts are now open with deadline on November 4 for posts as:

The postholder will collaborate with other researchers in the WEF WEBs consortium of major universities across the UK (Glasgow, Cambridge, Imperial College London, Oxford, Exeter and Newcastle) in developing stakeholder analysis of the urban governance of the Water Energy Food (WEF) nexus, in particular in relation to its multi-scalar challenges, while working closely with colleagues at Oxford University, Cambridge University and Imperial College London. Further particulars here.
The postholder will collaborate with other researchers in the “Vaccinating the Nexus’ (VTN) consortium of major universities across the UK (Southampton, Cambridge, Imperial College London, University of Nottingham, HR Wallingford, Aberystwyth, Loughborough and Bath) in developing a framework for assessing learning in urban governance, in particular in relation to contexts of crisis management, while supporting interdisciplinary integration and collaboration across VTN. Further particulars here.

The two postdoctoral researchers will work within the CLI team at UCL STEaPP, and will have a chance to further shape the programmes of research and policy engagement by CLI with key stakeholders like the World Bank, WHO or ARUP. Further information on CLI and CLI’s research programmes is available here: www.cityleadership.net

For any query on these posts please contact Steve Morrison (s.morrison@ucl.ac.uk), research coordinator at UCL STEaPP or dr Michele Acuto (m.acuto@ucl.ac.uk), director of the City Leadership Initiative.

CFP AAG 2016: Geographies of Education Restructuring and Teacher Union Activism in North America

Call for papers: AAG 2016 San Francisco, CA

Session Title: Geographies of Education Restructuring and Teacher Union Activism in North America

Organizers: Paul Booking (York University) and Peter Brogan (York University)

 

Education scholars and geographers have in recent years been collaborating and developing a rich sub-field of education geography (Taylor 2009). With the spatial turn in Critical education scholarship researchers have typically approached their inquiries through a socio-temporal lens that draws on the works of Henri Lefebvre, David Harvey, Pierre Bourdieu, Edward Soja, and others to expand the sociological study of education by insisting on the different ways in which “space matters” to the study of education. Geographers have described these spaces of education as, “rich subjects of critical geographical analysis,” especially as “neoliberal reforms… are transforming the spaces, subjectivities, and power relations of education” (McCreary et al. 2013, 255).

This session aims to elaborate a geographical analysis of recent attacks on public education, teachers and their unions throughout North America. In particular, we are interested in papers that focus on developing a spatialized political economic analysis of the policies of education restructuring and how teachers have been collectively fighting back against the destructive neoliberalization of education policy and practice, both through their unions and outside of them. Some of the questions that might be addressed in this session might include:

  • What kind of theory and research practice is necessary to both understand and contest the neoliberalization of public education and the assault on teacher unions?
  • How have the ideologies and politics of neoliberal education “reform,” on the one hand, and organizing models, strategies and tactics of resistance against such restructuring, on the other, evolved as they have travelled across space?
  • How have the dynamics of these struggles varied from place to place depending on diverse local, regional and national contexts? Put another way, how does education policy, activist discourses and practices travel and get taken up in different places across Canada, the United States and Mexico?
  • In what ways does race and racism figure into current educational reform policies and the remaking of urban space?
  • What is the political ecology of neoliberal education policy-making in North America?
  • In what ways does a critical geographical approach matter to grassroots struggles for education justice?

 

Submissions need not be limited to these suggestions; we welcome abstracts with expansive interpretations of these topics and themes.

Please send abstracts of up to 250 words to Peter Brogan (pbrogan1@gmail.com) and Paul Bocking (paulbocking@gmail.com) by Monday, October 23rd, 2015. Selected abstracts will be accepted by October 25th. All participants must provide AAG PINs by October 28th.

CFP AAG 2016: Geographies of State Terror

CALL FOR PAPERS: Annual Meeting of the Association of American Geographers (AAG), San Francisco, CA, March 29–April 2, 2016.

Geographies of State Terror

After forty-three students were disappeared one year ago from the streets of Iguala, Guerrero, Mexican citizens took to the streets by the hundreds of thousand, crying “Fue el Estado” – It was the State. This cry of grief and rage resonates with a complex global geography of violence that is sanctioned, designed, and administered by apparatuses of state power. In convening a session on Geographies of State Terror, we seek to better understand where and why the state terrorizes people.

State terrorism is nothing new. However, several twenty-first century political and economic shifts have altered these old forms of violence in pernicious and important ways. First, since September 11, 2001, the state has developed new technologies and claimed new license to surveille, apprehend, and even assassinate. Expansive new definitions of criminals and enemy combatants have authorized preemptive action against targeted likely threats, profiled by race, gender, religion, and nationality. Second, amidst the wreckage of the post-2008 financial crisis, renewed neoliberal and austerity policies have served to further consolidate wealth and accelerate the dispossession of the global poor. Third, these growing, discontented populations of surplus humanity are a source of increasing anxiety among the political and economic elite. This shifting terrain – in which state apparatuses seek to produce and punish terrorized subjects – demands innovative scholarship and solidarities.

We seek, through this session, to bring these three trends into conversation with one another toward a deeper, clearer understanding of how state terrorism operates and what it accomplishes.

Topics for proposed papers could include, but are not limited to:

  • Militarized and anticipatory policing
  • State-sanctioned extra-legal and paramilitary violence
  • Mass incarceration and detention
  • Border security and deportations
  • Racist and trans/homophobic profiling
  • “counter-terrorist” strikes
  • Institutions of impunity
  • Vagabond capitalism and social reproduction
  • Terror in the spaces of everyday life

Please send proposed titles and abstracts of up to 250 words by October 12th to: Emma Gaalaas Mullaney (egm012@bucknell.edu) and Vanessa Massaro (vam011@bucknell.edu). We will confirm participation by October 17th, with abstracts and AAG registration due on October 29th. 

CFP AAG 2016: The European Migration Crisis

Call for Papers: AAG 2016 San Francisco, CA 
 
Title: The European Migration Crisis
 
Photographs, interviews and news reports covering the rising number of international migrants who are arriving along the European Union’s border or have died trying to reach Europe are now ubiquitous. This recent and unprecedented increase in the number of migrants destined for Europe is so startling it has been identified as a migration “crisis”. While internally the European Union’s Schengen common border agreement purports freedom of movement for its citizens, international migrants arriving at the border face numerous challenges and the European Union has increased spending for its border patrol operations since April 2015. Discrepancies between various member-states responses’ to migrants and their willingness to accept asylum applications complicate matters further.
The aim of this session is to critically examine this migration from a theoretical and/or empirical perspective. We are interested in investigating a variety of factors surrounding this crisis including conflicts at the EU border, local and/or national responses (e.g. resistance or support for migrants), and media portrayal of the crisis. In this CFP, we invite papers that investigate the aforementioned topics as well as topics including, but not limited to:
  • Contestation surrounding EU or member-state regulations governing migration and refugee status, including external pressure on EU member-states to accept refugees
  • Conflicts at borders and challenges faced by both migrants and receiving member-states
  • Policies or beliefs (real or mistaken) that make certain member-states more desirable destinations than other EU member-states for migrants
  • Investigation of geographic tropes, discourse(s) and global imaginaries that contribute to perceptions of this surge of migrants as a “crisis”
  • Motivating factors that are driving many of these migrants out of their homeland
This session is sponsored by the Political Geography and European Specialty Groups. Reece Jones will serve as discussant for this session. Please send proposed titles and abstracts of no more than 250 words by email to Kara Dempsey (dempseyke@appstate.edu) by Friday, October 9, 2015.