CFP AAG Chicago, April 21–25, 2015

Logistics and Power
Sponsored by Political Geography Specialty Group

Organizers:
Martin Danyluk, University of Toronto
Kyle Loewen, University of British Columbia

Since the mid-twentieth century, the rise of logistics has played an important but underappreciated role in reconfiguring global socio-spatial relations. Emerging from military and imperialist origins, logistical developments like the intermodal shipping container, just-in-time production, and supply-chain management have been vital to both globalizing production and reorganizing forms of power. After being confined to business and management schools for several decades, logistics has only recently been taken up as an object of critical study (Bernes 2013; Bonacich and Wilson 2008; Cowen 2014; Hall and Hesse 2012; Hesse and Rodrigue 2004; Neilson 2012; Sekula 2002). Yet despite a growing body of research into the spatialities of global logistical systems, there is a need for further geographical reflection on the modes and structures of power at work within them.

This session therefore seeks to build wide-ranging critical conversations around the entanglements of logistics and power. For example, firms’ and states’ efforts to make commodity flows more efficient, flexible, and reliable are part of violent and contested processes rather than seamless, purely technical, or inherently beneficial operations. Cheap goods movement depends on increased worker exploitation and acts of dispossession throughout planetary distribution networks. In another sense, supply systems shape economic and political possibilities through the distribution of material resources and wastes, enabling certain ways of life while hindering others. Lastly, by  organizing infrastructures of supply, logistics affects processes of social reproduction, with gendered implications for consumption and labor practices.

Yet while global supply chains create new mechanisms of exploitation and control, they also present new opportunities for political resistance and struggle (Herod 2000; Reifer 2004; Tsing 2009). In this spirit, we invite papers from a range of disciplinary, methodological, and conceptual orientations—including feminist, Marxist, queer, de-colonial, assemblage, and anti-racist theory—that foreground the power-laden geographies of logistics. Examples include but are encouraged to exceed:

• uneven geographies of race and commodity flow
• politics within the supply chain
• labor and the logistics revolution
• logistics, urbanization, and infrastructure
• the entanglement of war and trade
• logistics, imperialism, and territory
• gendered dynamics of logistics and social reproduction
• logistics and biopolitics
• ways of being and becoming that are made possible and foreclosed through supply infrastructure
• enclosure and dispossession within logistical systems

Please e-mail abstracts of up to 250 words to Martin Danyluk (martin.danyluk@utoronto.ca) and Kyle Loewen (kyle.loewen@geog.ubc.ca) by Friday, October 17, 2014. Be sure to include a title and contact information.
 
References

• Bernes, Jasper. 2013. “Logistics, Counterlogistics and the Communist Prospect.” Endnotes, September. http://endnotes.org.uk/en/jasper-bernes-logistics-counterlogistics-and-the-communist-prospect.
• Bonacich, Edna, and Jake B. Wilson. 2008. Getting the Goods: Ports, Labor, and the Logistics Revolution. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
• Cowen, Deborah. 2014. The Deadly Life of Logistics: Mapping Violence in Global Trade. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
• Hall, Peter, and Markus Hesse, eds. 2012. Cities, Regions and Flows. London: Routledge.
• Herod, Andrew. 2000. “Implications of Just-in-Time Production for Union Strategy: Lessons from the 1998 General Motors-United Auto Workers Dispute.” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 90 (3): 521–47.
• Hesse, Markus, and Jean-Paul Rodrigue. 2004. “The Transport Geography of Logistics and Freight Distribution.” Journal of Transport Geography 12 (3): 171–84.
• Neilson, Brett. 2012. “Five Theses on Understanding Logistics as Power.” Distinktion: Scandinavian Journal of Social Theory 13 (3): 322–39.
• Reifer, Thomas Ehrlich. 2004. “Labor, Race, and Empire: Transport Workers and Transnational Empires of Trade, Production, and Finance.” In Labor versus Empire: Race, Gender, and Migration, edited by Gilbert G. Gonzalez, Raul A. Fernandez, Vivian Price, David Smith, and Linda Trinh Võ, 17–35. New York: Routledge.
• Sekula, Allan. 2002. Fish Story. 2nd ed. Düsseldorf: Richter Verlag.
• Tsing, Anna. 2009. “Supply Chains and the Human Condition.” Rethinking Marxism: A Journal of Economics, Culture and Society 21 (2): 148–76.

Call for Papers: AAG Conference, Chicago, Il. April 2015

Non-profits, Governance, and the Welfare State in the Post-Economic Crisis Period

The welfare state in the United States has been marked by a set of transitions in the last 30 years. This includes, most notably: the decline in cash assistance to the poor; the rescaling of the governance of the welfare state down to state and local levels; and the contracting out of basic public sector goods and services to private (for-profit and not-for-profit) corporations.  These processes are both well-established in practice, and well understood in geography and the social sciences more generally.  And there is some convergence towards the American framework of welfare state governance in other parts of the north Atlantic (most notably Canada and the United Kingdom).

Importantly, it was this welfare state that had to confront the economic crisis of 2007-2009 and that crisis’s very long shadow.  And it is this welfare state that we have for the foreseeable future.  As we continue to make sense of the crisis, and what it has wrought, it is important that we understand the ways in which the welfare state is able, or not able, to withstand such crises and how we should interpret the character of the welfare state moving forward.  In this session we will be addressing the governance and performance of the welfare state in the economic crisis and in the period since the worst of the crisis ended.

Papers in this session can address any number of issues related to this theme (and can be about the US or any other country) including:

• The role of non-profits in the post-crisis welfare state
• The fiscal crisis of states and municipalities and its aftermath
• The capacity of non-profits to withstand the crisis
• The continued privatization of the welfare state
• The changing character of American federalism in the contemporary political economy
• The implications of the current character of the welfare state for our understandings of state theory
• The spatial variability in the character and capacity of the welfare state
• The Big Society and the evolving inter-relationships between the state and non-profits in the UK

This session is being organized by James DeFilippis, Rutgers University (jdefilip@rci.rutgers.edu); Phil Ashton, University of Illinois-Chicago (pashton@uic.edu); and Emily Rosenman, University of British Columbia (emily.rosenman@geog.ubc.ca). If you are interested in participating in the session, or if you have any questions, please email James by October 30.

CFP AAG Chicago, April 2015

Methods in Legal Geography
Organizers: Margo Kleinfeld,  University of Wisconsin-Whitewater;  Sarah A. Moore, University of Wisconsin-Madison

Legal geography has emerged as a significant subfield in the last two decades. While much rich empirical work has been conducted, we follow Irus Braverman’s (2014) call to more explicitly engage questions of methodology and methods by soliciting papers that discuss these topics in any substantive field within legal geography.

Topics may include:

• How do legal geographers define and collect data? How do these compare to other approaches common in geography (spatial analysis and visualization, ethnography, archival research, etc.)
• What are the most compelling modes of analysis for understanding how the law works through and creates space?
• What other disciplines do legal scholars draw on for methods? How do legal geographers implement methods from other subfields?
• How can we compare such phenomena as “jurisdiction” and “territory” across locales and at different times?

Please submit abstracts to Sarah A. Moore (smoore7@wisc.edu) or Margo Kleinfeld (kleinfem@uww.edu) by October 29, 2014

CFP AAG Annual Meeting, 21-25 April 2015, Chicago

Authoritarian resource governance, emergent resistance, and unequal development
Session organizer: Miles Kenney-Lazar (Graduate School of Geography, Clark University)

Political ecologists and resource geographers have well-theorized the profound ways in which social movements shape resource governance by advancing the claims of marginalized resource users to lands, forests, and fisheries that they have been denied access to as a result of unequal political-economic forces, such as historical land inequality and exclusion (Wolford 2010), rapid land use changes (Rocheleau and Ross 1995), and large-scale extractive investments (Perreault 2006, Himley 2013). Not only do such movements improve access of small-scale and marginalized peasants, forest dwellers, and pastoralists to land and resources, they also expand spaces of democratic resource governance to include the voices of everyday resource users and civil society (Bebbington et al. 2008). This rich body of work, while expanding understandings of how movements improve resource access and governance processes, has largely focused on contexts and cases in which popular movements—despite the significant political obstacles they face—can and do occur in open, direct, and confrontational ways.

In this session, we seek to answer how and why resistance emerges and operates in situations ‘where there is no movement’ (Malseed 2008), where social movements, and forms of open and confrontational protest, are highly repressed. In such authoritarian resource regimes, where resources are governed undemocratically, involving little participation by small-scale resource users and civil society, how can resistance emerge and make successful claims to land and resources, affecting development and governance outcomes, chipping away at divisions of access and power? Furthermore, how and why are some resistance efforts more effective than others, leading to unequal development outcomes? We seek to move beyond the literature on everyday resistance (Scott 1986) and ‘avoidance protest’ (Adas 1986) to examine how dissent of the repressed navigates the power-laden boundaries between covert and overt resistance (Walker 2008), seeking to make resource claims heard and generate social change without upsetting pre-existing structures of power in ways that invoke further political repression. We seek to understand how spaces of resistance are forged and expanded in places where they did not previously exist.

To address these issues we invite theoretically innovative and empirically driven papers examining emergent resistance in relation to all relevant themes or topics across a wide set of authoritarian or undemocratic resource governance contexts globally. Key themes include, but are not limited to:

• Navigating borders between authoritarianism and democracy, protest and repression in repressive and ostensibly democratic resource regimes
• The role of authoritarian legacies and memories of repression in shaping contemporary forms of resistance, dissent and refusal in democratic contexts
• How movements and governments negotiate boundaries between popular demand, protest, and repression
• The interactions and engagements of locally-based, underground resistance groups with broader, transnational agrarian social movements and agendas
• Spatial tactics of resistance, dissent, and refusal in authoritarian, undemocratic contexts
• Relationships between resource materiality and emergent forms of resistance
• Resisting unequal access to a diverse set of resources and environmental goods such as urban residential land, public spaces and commons, transportation and communication infrastructure, agricultural lands, forests, rangelands, fisheries, minerals, and carbon.

If interested in participating please send a 250 word abstract to Miles Kenney-Lazar (mkenneylazar@clarku.edu) by Wednesday, October 15, 2014. Participation in the session will be confirmed by Wednesday, October 22.

Note: We expect to have a discussant for this session and therefore presenters will be asked to submit a written paper a few weeks before the conference.

References

• Adas, M. 1986. From Footdragging to Flight: The Evasive History of Peasant Avoidance Protest in South and South‐East Asia. Journal of Peasant Studies, 13(2), 64–86.
• Bebbington, A., D. Humphreys Bebbington, J. Bury, J. Lingan, J.P. Muñoz, and M. Scurrah. 2008. Mining and Social Movements: Struggles Over Livelihood and Rural Territorial Development in the Andes. World Development, 36(12), 2888–905.
• Himley, M. 2013. Regularizing Extraction in Andean Peru: Mining and Social Mobilization in an Age of Corporate Social Responsibility. Antipode, 45(2), 394-416.
• Malseed, K. 2008. Where There Is No Movement: Local Resistance and the Potential for Solidarity. Journal of Agrarian Change, 8(2-3), 489–514.
• Perreault, T. 2006. From the Guerra Del Agua to the Guerra Del Gas: Resource Governance, Neoliberalism and Popular Protest in Bolivia. Antipode, 38(1), 150-172.
• Rocheleau, D. and L. Ross. 1995. Trees as Tools, Trees as Texts: Struggles Over Resources in Zambrana-Chacuey, Dominican Republic. Antipode, 27(4), 407-428.
• Scott, J. 1986. Everyday forms of peasant resistance. Journal of Peasant Studies, 13(2), 5–35.
• Walker, K.L.M. 2008. From Covert to Overt: Everyday Peasant Politics in China and the Implications for Transnational Agrarian Movements
• Wolford, W. 2010. This Land is Ours Now: Social Mobilization and the Meanings of Land in Brazil. Durham: Duke University Press.

CFP AAG 2015 Annual Meeting, Chicago, Illinois, April 21-25, 2015

Informality and the Everyday State
Session organizers: Hanna Hilbrandt, the Open University; Hannah Schilling, Humboldt Universität, Berlin; Tauri Tuvikene, University College London and Tallinn University.
Discussant: Nicholas Blomley, Simon Fraser University, Vancouver.

This paper-session aims to explore informal practices in regulatory regimes presumed to rely on strong legal frameworks and functioning bureaucracies. It strives to combine two perspectives. On the one hand, research has examined informal practices of vending, housing and governance in cities of the global North (Mukhija and Loukaitou-Sideris 2014; Hentschel 2014). This work has drawn on the rich experience of research in the global South that has shown how informality is strongly bound to the workings of state institutions (Roy 2005; Yiftachel 2009). On the other hand, legal geographers and state-theorists have thoroughly explored the social and legal practices through which regulations are made and enacted in the functioning of modern bureaucracies (Blomley 2014; Valverde 2012). We seek to learn from these insights on the mundane mechanisms of regulating cities to push the debate on informality in two directions.

Firstly, the session aims to discuss how informality works as part of the normal functioning of bureaucracies, rather than as a result of the inadequacy of regulations or the transgressions of street-level officers. Cases of informality are often studied as examples of institutional injustice or states of exception, in which people’s relation to the state is marked by eviction or harassment (Duneier 1999; Devlin 2011). However, research on the nature of informality in the context of functioning institutions remains scarce. How do legal and bureaucratic institutions facilitate, enable or constrain informal practices? In what way do these ‘normal’ modes of governance produce or further inequalities?

Secondly, cases of informality in ‘high-capacity-states’ pose new conceptual challenges to theorizing cities. Urban scholars have highlighted the interdependence of formal structures and informal practices (McFarlane and Waibel 2012). They have conceptualized informality as a ‘mode of urbanization’ to show how informal processes are strongly bound to the workings of state institutions (Roy 2005). Yet, conceptual uncertainty about the link between urban informality and the mundane mechanisms of institutional regulation remains. We aim to attend to the ways in which the everyday state works, can rely on, or is transcended by informal processes. How can we theorize the interaction of informal and regulatory practices in the everyday politics of governing cities?

We welcome both empirical and theoretical papers that discuss the links between informality and the workings of regulatory regimes presumed to rely on strong legal groundings and functioning bureaucracies. If you are interested in participating in this session, please submit an abstract of no more than 250 words to Hanna Hilbrandt (hanna.hilbrandt@open.ac.uk) by October 10th 2014. We will notify the authors of selected papers by October 15th 2014 and ask them to register on the AAG website by October 30th 2014.

References
Bayat, Asef (2004) Global… and the politics of the informal. In, Roy, A. and Sayyad, N. A. Urban Informality: Transnational Perspectives from the Middle East, Latin America, and South Asia. Oxford: Lexington Books, 79 – 105.
Blomley, Nicholas (2014) Disentangling Law: The Practice of Bracketing. Annual Review of Law and Social Science 10 (1): (forthcoming).
Duneier, Mitchell (2001) Sidewalk. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Devlin, Ryan T. (2011) ‘An Area That Governs Itself ’: Informality, Uncertainty and the Management of Street Vending in New York City. Planning Theory 10 (1): 53 – 65.
Hentschel, Christine (2014) Postcolonializing Berlin and the Fabrication of the Urban. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research (forthcoming).
McFarlane, Colin and Michael Waibel (2012) Urban Informalities. Reflections on the Formal and Informal. London: Ashgate.
Mukhija, Vinit and Anastasia Loukaitou-Sideris (2014) The Informal American City: Beyond Taco Trucks and Day Labor. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press.
Roy, A (2005) Urban informality: toward an epistemology of planning. Journal of the American Planning, Association 71 (2) 147 – 158.
Simone, A. M. (2004) For the City yet to Come: Changing African Life in Four Cities. Durham: Duke University Press.
Valverde, Mariana (2012) Everyday Law on the Street. Chicago: University Of Chicago Press.
Yiftachel, Oren (2009) Critical theory and “gray space”: Mobilization of the colonized. CITY 13, 246 –263.

CFP AAG Annual Conference 2015, Chicago, IL

Enforcement Infrastructures: Emerging Political Economies of Immigration, Borders, and Security
Organizer: Lauren Martin, University of Oulu, Finland

What was once defined by a bipolar tension between liberty and security is now described as an assemblage of financial, governmental, and legal practices in which notions of risk, potentiality, and calculable futures travel amongst economic, security, and geopolitical institutions (Amoore 2013, De Goede 2012). Meanwhile, research on migration, labor, and immigration enforcement bears evidence that enforcement actions suppress wages and help to produce a docile, low-wage working class (De Genova 2002, Harrison and Lloyd 2012). In addition, a host of intermediaries—public, private, for-profit, non-profit—have taken on the daily work of detaining, processing, and deporting people: counties and provinces, urban police forces, for-profit firms, non-profit humanitarian organizations, and a wide array service providers working in detention and accommodation centres (Flynn and Cannon 2009, Hiemstra and Conlon forthcoming). Border walls and border policing use military equipment and personnel, while prisons and residential facilities are converted into detention centers (Jones 2012, Mountz et al. 2013). Policing tactics with long histories of racial discriminations, such as traffic stops and ID checks, become immigration enforcement measures (Coleman 2009). Likewise, laws and policies unrelated to immigration status become de facto immigration regulations (Varsanyi et al. 2012), and legal practices travel between states (Flynn 2014).

The blurring and borrowing of financial risk analysis, surveillance technologies, databanking, immigration inspections, urban policing, labor politics, and legal frameworks has demanded new approaches to the political economies of security. This session seeks both empirical and theoretical papers that shed new light on these political economies.

Possible topics include:

• linkages between surveillance, risk analysis, and enforcement measures
• unexpected sites of immigration and border policing
• new actors in immigration and border enforcement
• extralegal immigration law and de facto enforcement
• public policy as immigration policy
• ways of seeing, sensing migrants
• architectures of enforcement: roads, sidewalks, transportation, housing
• theorizations of political economies of security

To participate please send your 250 word abstract and contact information to Lauren Martin (lauren.martin (at) oulu.fi) by October 23, 2014.

References:

• Amoore, L. 2013. Politics of Possibility: Risk and Security Beyond Probability. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
• De Genova, N. 2002. “Immigrant Illegality and Deportability in Everyday Life,” Annual Review of Anthropology 31: 419-447.
• De Goede, M. 2012. Speculative Security: The Politics of Pursuing Terrorist Monies. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
• Flynn, M. 2014. How and Why Immigration Detention Crossed the Globe. Global Detention Project Working Paper No. 8. April 2014. http://www.globaldetentionproject.org/fileadmin/publications/Flynn_diffusion_WorkingPaper_v2.pdf
• Flynn, M. and C. Cannon. 2009. “The Privatization of Immigration Detention: Towards a Global View,” Global Detention Project Working Paper No. 1, September 2009. http://www.globaldetentionproject.org/fileadmin/docs/GDP_PrivatizationPaper_Final5.pdf.
• Jones, R. 2012. Border Walls: Security and the War on Terror in the United States, India, and Israel. Zed Books: London.
• Harrison, J.L. and S. Lloyd. 2012. “Illegality at Work: Deportability and the Productive New Era of Immigration,” Antipode 44(2): 365-385.
• Mountz, A, K Coddington, RT Catania, J Loyd. 2013. “Conceptualizing detention: Mobility, containment, bordering, and exclusion,” Progress in Human Geography 37(4): 522-541.
• Varsanyi, M., P.G. Lewis, D. Provine, S. Decker. 2010. “A Multi-layered Jurisdictional Patchwork: Immigration Federalism in the United States.” Law and Policy 34(2): 138-158.

Call for papers: British International Studies Association 40th Anniversary Conference, London, 16-19th June 2015

The Place of Technology in Environmental Politics
Organiser: Michael Keary, Aberystwyth University

Technology has an uneasy place in environmental politics. Technological optimism/pessimism dominated its early debates. Many of its classic texts, like Carson’s Silent Spring, are critiques of technologies. Green social movements often crystallised around opposition to developments like nuclear power. It may, however, be time for a reappraisal of where technology stands in the discipline. Ecological modernisation, especially its more radical strands, has won many adherents. Renewable technologies, championed early by green activists and scholars, are now a big part of mainstream energy policy. Information technology, often promising “eco-friendly solutions”, has proliferated. Yet opposition to innovations like “fracking” and underground coal gasification has been staunch. Much recent scholarship retains the early scepticism of “technical fixes”, of the mechanical or institutional variety.

The aim of this panel is to review recent scholarship and get a sense of where technology stands in environmental politics today. It is interested in papers that review theoretical changes, that advocate new perspectives in the sub-discipline, or that identify continuity or change in political or social attitudes. The subject matter is intrinsically interdisciplinary, so papers from across the social sciences are enthusiastically sought.

Possible topics include:

• Specific technologies in their local, state, or international politics
• How technology is theorised
• Technocratic or regulative approaches to environmental problems
•  Modelling, scenarios and planning technology
• Technology and environmental social movements
• The global renewable-technology industry

If you are interested in submitting a paper, please email Michael Keary at mkk06@aber.ac.uk

Call for Papers: AAG 2015, Chicago, IL

Assembling Power: Connections and disjunctures in the works of Foucault and Latour
Organized by Nate Gabriel (Rutgers University) and Eric Sarmiento (Rutgers University)

The works of Michel Foucault and Bruno Latour are central to various conceptions of ‘assemblage,’ and to recent critical geographic inquiry more broadly. Simultaneously, in critical geography and cognate fields, research frameworks drawing on assemblage thinking have been viewed with some skepticism even as, and perhaps because, they have gained an increasingly firm hold in the discipline (cf. Robbins and Marks 2010; Castree 2002; Holifield 2009; Brenner et al. 2011; McFarlane 2011). The political and analytical use of assemblage thinking has been addressed at some length, but within these discussions the most fervent debates typically revolve around theorizations of asymmetrical power relations: do power disparities explain social realities and injustice, or is the task of critical analysis to explain existing power relations in all of their unevenness? A number of related issues and analytical concerns follow from this basic divergence, such as the status of more-than-human actors in mediating social relations (Whatmore 2002; Braun 2005), including the production of value through labor (Castree 2002); conceptions and consequences of theorizing agency differently (Bennett 2010); the analytical relationship between epistemological and ontological questions (Grosz 1994, 2008); definitions of ‘the political’ (Stengers 2010; Braun and Whatmore 2010; Hinchliffe et al. 2005); and so on.

In this session, we seek to further these investigations by exploring the similarities, differences, and synergies between the works of Foucault and Latour. We contend that when viewed together, their writings — with all of their overlaps, disjunctures, complementarities, and divergent emphases — generate a productive ferment with respect to questions of power, space, agency, and materiality that has yet to be fully explored. To this end, we seek papers that focus explicitly on the connections (or dis-connections) between Foucault and Latour, which may pursue any number of avenues, including but not limited to:

• Subjectivity and embodiment
• The relationship(s) between poststructuralism and assemblage thinking
• Spatialities of power
• Metaphysics of transformation and becoming
• Research methods
• Genealogy
• Agency as a distributed phenomenon
• Knowledge as “eco-physiologically grounded” (Babich 1994)
• The ethical cultivation of the self, and the forces that impinge on it
• Ontology and/or epistemology
• Expanded notions of the political

Interested authors are invited to submit a title and a 250-word abstract by October 15, 2014 to both Nate Gabriel (nategabriel@gmail.com) and Eric Sarmiento (ericsryanarmiento@gmail.com). Also feel free to write us with any questions or to discuss potential topics.

References
Babich, Babette (1994). Nietzsche’s Philosophy of Science: Reflecting Science on the Ground of Art and Life. Albany, SUNY Press.
Bennett, Jane (2010). Vibrant Matter: a political ecology of things. Chapel Hill: Duke University Press.
Braun, Bruce (2005). “Environmental issues: writing a more-than-human urban geography.” Progress in Human Geography 29:5 (635-650).
Braun, Bruce and Sarah Whatmore (2010). Political Matter: Technoscience, Democracy, and Public Life.Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Brenner, N., D. Madden, and D. Wachsmuth (2011). “Assemblage urbanism and the challenges of critical urban theory.” City 15:2 (225-240).
Castree, Noel (2002). “False antitheses? Marxism, Nature, and Actor-Networks.” Antipode 34:1 (111-146).
Grosz, Elizabeth (1994). Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Grosz, Elizabeth (2008). Chaos, territory, art: Deleuze and the framing of the earth. New York, Columbia University Press.
Hinchliffe, S., M. Kearnes, M. Degen, S. Whatmore (2005). “Urban wild things: a cosmopolitical experiment.” Environment and Planning D 23:5 (643-658).
Holifield, Ryan (2009). “Actor-Network Theory as a Critical Approach to Environmental Justice: A Case Against Synthesis with Urban Political Ecology.” Antipode 41:4 (637-658).
McFarlane, Colin (2011). “Assemblage and Critical Urban Praxis: Part one.” City 15:2 (204-224).
Robbins, Paul and Brian Marks (2010). “Assemblage Geographies.” In S. Smith, R. Pain, and S. Marston (eds.), The SAGE Handbook of Social Geographies. London: Sage.
Stengers, Isabelle (2010). Cosmopolitics I. Robert Bononno (trans.). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Whatmore, Sarah (2002). Hybrid Geographies: natures, cultures, spaces. London: Sage.

CFP, AAG 2015 – Chicago

Critical Geographies of US Farm Bill Policy & Politics

The United States ‘Farm Bill’ gets re-debated, re-written, and re-authorized by Congress every 5-8 years. This omnibus legislation authorizes nearly US$100 billion of annual spending on a vast range of federal supports and services, including nutrition assistance, commodity payments, specialty crop supports, agricultural extension, soil conservation, grain reserves (or their dismantling), agricultural research, crop insurance, local food marketing, food aid, biofuels, and agricultural trade (including WTO compliance—or lack thereof) among many other topics. This massive piece of legislation directly impacts growers, eaters, communities and landscapes throughout the US, and indirectly impacts agro-food landscapes and systems globally as the hegemon’s shadow is impossible to avoid, whether it be in the form of subsidized grain exports, foreign agricultural assistance, or policy mimicry.  While primarily occupying the attention of narrow sectional interests for many generations, the Farm Bill is finally beginning to generate broader public interest and political engagement, engaging diverse voices in debates around the optimal role of government in fostering a food system that feeds the nation in a socially, ecologically, and economically sustainable manner.

This panel seeks to gather geographers studying the domestic and international dimensions of the US Farm Bill—both historically and contemporarily. Specifically, we wish to create a critical-geography-focused forum to explore the many socio-spatial causes, consequences and possibilities of US agricultural policy and politics—from monopolistic political economy to rural-urban political alliances, from the political ecology of dead zones to migrant labor. Both the making of US agricultural policy and its implications demand critical and collective analysis.  How is it that this amalgam of policies, full of contradictions, is continually made and remade?  Why is reform always seemingly “around the corner”? How do policy goals get translated and transformed in the policy making and implementation process? To begin to answer these questions we welcome empirical and theoretical submissions exploring the politics and potential of the US Farm Bill with regard to ecological and social justice. Join us.

To those interested: please send your 250-word abstract (with paper title and name and affiliation of all authors) to either organizer by October 24th.

Session Organizers:
Garrett GRADDY-LOVELACE, American University School of International Service (graddy@american.edu)
Adam DIAMOND, American University School of International Service (adiamond@american.edu)

Co-Sponsors:
AAG Geographies of Food & Agriculture Specialty Group
AAG Cultural & Political Ecology Specialty Group
AAG Rural Geography Specialty Group

AAG 2015 Annual Meeting, Chicago, 21-25 April 2015

CFP: Geographical Encounters with “Odd” Research Objects

Lia Frederiksen (University of Toronto)
David K. Seitz (University of Toronto)

Do you have an object of study that seems “odd”? If so, let’s talk.

Our aim is to convene a dialogue among critical human geographers about our objects of study that can invoke puzzlement from non-academic audiences, and within disciplinary and interdisciplinary subfields. Our common ground in the session would be that we are frequently asked why and what we are studying in and through our objects of research.

We’re interested in talking with each other about how “odd” is rendered in light of more common theoretical framings and subfields. The oddness might therefore emerge, endure, and intensify in relation to the audiences we speak to and the categories we pursue deeper understanding through. Such objects would be easily described neither as resistant, nor emancipatory, nor enigmatic. As with Robyn Wiegman’s (2012) “object lessons”, we are keenly interested in exploring what it means to “have” an object of study, particularly in terms of critical human geography.

Critical (and especially feminist and queer) geographers have long engaged in powerful efforts to expose the political constitution and valences of such putatively apolitical objects as the body, the home, and the public park (Nast and Pile 1998, Domosh and Bondi 1998, Brown 2000, Mitchell and Staeheli 2007). Our engagement with similarly overlooked objects builds on this work to ask about the political stakes of ostensibly unremarkable objects — which can register as “too boring”, “too bourgeois”, or “not sexy”. We see this pursuit as linking with critical geography’s continued push to produce an analysis of power without “proper objects” (Butler 1994).

How might these objects benefit from critical geography’s sustained insistence on and curiosity about the banal and diffuse character of power? How might the awkward relationship between an uncommonly researched object and a subfield help to recast ongoing conversations? How might these uneasy relationships inform our research design and methods?

While we are aware of the novelty of an “odd” research object, we aim to avoid the trivial or peculiar inflections in posing and discussing these questions with each other. We are thinking of oddness much in the way that Berlant (2011) insists that it is social relations, not the objects themselves, that generate “cruel-optimistic” conditions which obstruct potential flourishing. We therefore look forward to engaging in a rigorous conversation among critical geographers that looks intently at the relationship between under-researched or under-theorized objects of study to bring fresh ideas to our subfields and theoretical framings.

Odd objects might include — but are by no means limited to — sites of banal consumption and ordinary consumer citizenship: bars, toilets, libraries, churches, phone booths, salons (hair, nail, etc.), electrical outlets, water taps, hardware stores, elevators, weigh stations, work stations, automobiles, recreational campgrounds, kitchen gardens, ferry boats. We are particularly hopeful to convene a discussion of these geographies spanning Global North and Global South framings.

If you are interested in taking part in this special session please send a 250-word abstract, including title, author(s), institutional affiliation(s), e-mail address(es) and 5 keywords to oddobjectsaag@gmail.com by October 1, 2014.

Works Cited
Berlant, Lauren. 2011. Cruel Optimism. Durham: Duke University Press.
Brown, Michael P. 2000. Closet Space: Geographies of Metaphor from the Body to the Globe. London: Routledge.
Butler, Judith. 1994. “Against Proper Objects. Introduction.” differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 6.2+3: 1-25.
Domosh, Mona and Liz Bondi. 1998. “On the Contours of Public Space: A Tale of Three Women.” Antipode 30.3: 270-289.
Nast, Heidi J. and Steve Pile, eds. 1998. Places Through the Body. London: Routledge.
Weigman, Robyn. 2012. Object Lessons. Durham: Duke University Press.