2nd CALL FOR PAPERS
AAG Annual Meeting, April 10-14, 2018, New Orleans, LA

From Kaepernick and Qatar to Cobb County and the Kop: Critical Geographies of Sports Capitalism
Organizer: Andy Walter (University of West Georgia)

Quoting literary theorist Terry Eagleton, “No finer way of resolving the problems of capitalism has been dreamed up” than football (soccer). If this reads as an overstatement, geographer Doreen Massey argued that concerning oneself with the ways in which capital has enclosed football offers a means to understand and, on that basis, figure out ways to challenge neoliberalized and financialized society. Recent years have provided spectacular illustrations of both scholars’ claims and their relevance to modern sports generally. From the overt rent-seeking and subversion of local democracy by/for the Atlanta Braves in Cobb County, Georgia, to the deadly exploitation of migrant workers building stadiums for a World Cup serving as a conduit for the circulation of Qatar’s massive surpluses, sport offers a concrete picture of the modes and consequences of wealth extraction and accumulation. At the same time, professional sport provides a view of various ways in which capital’s dominant forms are challenged and grounds are potentially established to create different, less exploitative and unjust ones. For example, by “taking a knee” quarterback Colin Kaepernick inspired a players’ anti-racist movement that exposed the humanity and power of highly-skilled, highly-paid workers and ultimately disrupted the smooth multi-billion dollar flow of value in the NFL (leading NFL owners to collectively withhold work from Kaepernick as an apparent retaliation). Meanwhile, at Liverpool FC’s Anfield Stadium, the loyal supporters of the Kop end, among others elsewhere in the stadium, walked out of a match en masse to contest the narrowing of their role in the club to that of customer and to caution the American owners against treating the club as simply a financial, rather than a community, asset.

This session provides a forum for papers exploring the ways in which space and place figure into the operations and outcomes of sports capitalism as well as challenges and alternatives to it at all scales and in any region of the world. Potential topics include, but are not limited to, the connections between the production and consumption of sport as a commodity and:

Rent-seeking through land development, media rights, etc.
Labor regulation, exploitation, and organization within and beyond the stadium
Fandom and neoliberal subject formation
Fandom and solidarity
Gender/sexism/gender politics and injustices
Urban politics and citizenship
Democracy and emancipatory politics
Economic governance
Race/racism/racial injustice
Global value chains/production networks
Urban public space
Urban infrastructures
Financialization of the built environment
Commoning and expropriation
Urban and global wealth inequality

In you are interested in contributing to this session, please contact Andy Walter (awalter@westga.edu) with a description of your paper’s topic, or any questions you may have about it, by October 23.

​This is a second call for papers devoted to electoral geography. Right now we have four papers and we would like a fifth paper. If demand warrants we could add a second session. Papers to devoted to electoral geography–elections, electoral districts, gerrymandering, methods, results, and other topics related to electoral geography are welcome. Recent elections and historical elections are welcome. Topics related to the 2016 election and elections worldwide are welcome.  Please join us in a session or two devoted to electoral geography instead of taking your random chances.

Entangled Neoliberal Natures:

Payments for Ecosystem Services as Sites of Contestation, Hybridization and Transformation

Annual Meeting of the American Association of Geographers (AAG)

New Orleans, Louisiana

April 10-14, 2018

Session Organizers: Elizabeth Shapiro-Garza (Duke University), Gert Van Hecken (University of Antwerp), Pamela McElwee (Rutgers University), and Esteve Corbera (Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona)

The concept of payments for ecosystem services (PES), through which financial incentives are provided to landowners for management practices thought to produce environmental benefits (i.e. carbon sequestration, biodiversity conservation, or cleaner and/or greater quantities of water downstream), initially emerged in the late 1980s and have since become a ubiquitous approach to environmental conservation. As a market-based environmental approach based on a neoclassical economic model intended to increase both the efficiency and effectiveness of environmental initiatives through voluntary, direct, market-like agreements between users and providers of environmental services (Wunder 2005), the PES approach matched well with and was bolstered by the neoliberal ideology that was then on the ascendency (Engel et al., 2008; Gomez-Baggethun et al. 2010, Norgaard 2010).

Accordingly, much of the critical scholarship on PES has been based on the framework of “neoliberal natures” (Heynen et al. 2007), with claims that imposing the structure of market logics and capitalist rationales on the conservation of nature is akin to allowing the lion to guard the lamb (Sullivan 2009; Norgaard 2010; McAfee 2012; Fletcher and Buscher 2017). However, although the original neoclassical economic model of PES largely continues to be upheld as the ideal by those who promote and fund PES, from multilateral lending institutions to international environmental NGOs, few if any initiatives conform to its constructs (Muradian et al. 2010; Kolinjivadi et al., 2017; Kosoy and Corbera 2010; Vatn 2010; Pirard 2012; Singh 2015; Van Hecken et al. 2015a). However, more recent, empirically grounded studies that both build on and push back against this body of critique, have explored these initiatives as “actually-existing neoliberalisms” (Bakker 2010, p 720), describing the nuanced processes through which the structure of neoliberal ideology at the foundation of PES is contested, transformed and hybridized through the agency of actors in the sites of implementation, from states, to social movements, to agrarian smallholders (McElwee 2012; Mahanty et al. 2012; Milne 2012; Shapiro-Garza 2013a; Shapiro-Garza 2013b; McElwee et al. 2014; Bétrisey and Mager 2015; Van Hecken et al. 2015b; vonHedeman and Osborne 2016; Kolinjivadi et al. 2016; Almeida-Leñero et al. 2017; Osborne and Shapiro-Garza 2017).

We are interested bringing together a collection of empirically grounded, theoretically informed presentations that explore the many ways in which the neoclassicial economic assumptions of a model of PES are or are not contested, hybridized and/or transformed by the grounded political, economic, socio-cultural dynamics of the sites of implementation. Some of the themes we are interested in exploring include the ways in which the following factors work to entangle the neoliberal logics of these initiatives to, successfully or not, through:

●      Historical trajectories in the sites of implementation that run counter to neoliberal constructs;

●      Alternative values held for the socio-natural systems;

●      Dynamics of power and inequality;

●      Institutional structures and constructs.

We are also interested in papers that include a more explicit discussion of the methods or theoretical frameworks that allow for the study of these processes.

Please send a title and an abstract of no more than 250 words by October 20, 2018 to Elizabeth Shapiro-Garza (elizabeth[dot]shapiro[at]duke.edu). Feel free to contact us in advance with preliminary interests, ideas and questions about these sessions.

References

Almeida-Leñero, L., Revollo-Fernández, D., Caro-Borrero, A., Ruiz-Mallén, I., Corbera, E., Mazari-Hiriart, M. And Figueroa, F., 2017. Not the same for everyone: Community views of Mexico’s payment for environmental services programmes. Environmental Conservation, pp.1-11.

Bétrisey F., Mager, C., 2015. Les paiements pour services environnementaux de la Fondation Natura Bolivia entre logiques réciprocitaires, redistributives et marchandes. Revue Française de Socio-Economie 2015/1(15), 39-58.

Fletcher, R., Büscher, B., 2017. The PES Conceit: Revisiting the Relationship between Payments for Environmental Services and Neoliberal Conservation. Ecological Economics 132, 224-23

Heynen, N., McCarthy, J., Robbins, P., Prudham, S. (Eds.), 2007. Neoliberal Environments: False Promises and Unnatural Consequences. Routledge, New York.

Kolinjivadi, V., Charré, S., Adamowski, J., Kosoy, N., 2016. Economic Experiments for Collective Action in the Kyrgyz Republic: Lessons for Payments for Ecosystem Services (PES). Ecological Economics.

Kolinjivadi, V., Van Hecken, G., Vela Almeida, D., Kosoy, N., Dupras, J., 2017. Neoliberal performatives and the “making” of payments for ecosystem services (PES). forthcoming in Progress in Human Geography.

Mahanty, S., Milne, S., Dressler, W., Filer, C., 2012. The social life of forest carbon: property and politics in the production of a new commodity. Human Ecology 40(5), 661-664.

McAfee, K., 2012. The Contradictory Logic of Global Ecosystem Services Markets. Development and Change 43, 105-131.

McElwee, P.D., 2012. Payments for environmental services as neoliberal market-based forest conservation in Vietnam: Panacea or problem?. Geoforum, 43(3), pp.412-426.

McElwee, P., Nghiem, T., Le, H., Vu, H., Tran, N., 2014. Payments for environmental services and contested neoliberalisation in developing countries: A case study from Vietnam. Journal of Rural Studies 36, 423-440.

Milne, S., Adams, W.M., 2012. Market masquerades: uncoveing the politics of community-level payments for environmental services in Cambodia. Development and Change 43, 133–158.

Muradian, R., Corbera, E., Pascual, U., Kosoy, N., May, P.H., 2010. Reconciling theory and practice: An alternative conceptual framework for understanding payments for environmental services. Ecological Economics 69, 1202-1208.

Osborne, T., Shapiro-Garza, E., 2017. Embedding carbon markets: Complicating commodification of ecosystem services in Mexico’s forests. Annals of the Association of American Geographers.

Pirard, R., 2012. Market-based instruments for biodiversity and ecosystem services: A lexicon. Environmental Science and Policy 19-20, 59-68.

Shapiro-Garza, E., 2013a. Contesting the market-based nature of Mexico’s national payments for ecosystem services programs: Four sites of articulation and hybridization. Geoforum 46, 5-15.

Shapiro-Garza, E., 2013b. Contesting market-based conservation: Payments for ecosystem services as a surface of engagement for rural social movements in Mexico. Human Geography 6(1), 134-150.

Singh, N.M., 2015. Payments for ecosystem services and the gift paradigm: Sharing the burden and joy of environmental care. Ecological Economics 117, 53-61.

Tacconi, L., 2012. Redefining payments for environmental services. Ecological Economics 73, 29-36.

Van Hecken, G., Bastiaensen, J., Windey, C., 2015a. Towards a power-sensitive and socially-informed analysis of payments for ecosystem services (PES): Addressing the gaps in the current debate. Ecological Economics 120, 117-125.

Van Hecken, G., Bastiaensen, J., Huybrechs, F., 2015b. What’s in a name? Epistemic perspectives and Payments for Ecosystem Services policies in Nicaragua. Geoforum 63, 55-66.

Vatn, A., 2010. An institutional analysis of payments for environmental services. Ecological Econimics 69 (6), 1245–1252.

vonHedemann, N. and Osborne, T. 2016. State Forestry Incentives and Community Stewardship: A Political Ecology of Payments and Compensation for Ecosystem Services in Guatemala’s Highlands. Journal of Latin American Geography, 15(1), 83-110.

Wunder, S., 2005. Payments for environmental services: some nuts and bolts, Occasional Paper No. 42. Bogor, Center for International Forestry Research (CIFOR).

Organizers: Francis Massé (Dept. of Geography, York University), Jared Margulies (Department
of Politics, University of Sheffield)
Discussant: Bram Büscher (Wageningen University)

From extralegal rhino and elephant hunting, to illegal timber harvesting, to illegal, unregulated,
and underreported fishing (IUU), and the sourcing and trade of birds and reptiles, wildlife crime
and the responses to it are gaining increasing scholarly and policy attention. The International
Consortium on Combating Wildlife Crime (ICCWC) defines wildlife as “all fauna and flora”
(CITES, 2017). It defines crime as “acts committed contrary to national laws and regulations
intended to protect natural resources and to administer their management and use” (Ibid). At the
same time, wildlife crime is also transnational in scope, as the transport and sale of illicitly
harvested or otherwise protected species of fauna and flora make up the growing illegal wildlife
trade (IWT), a multi-billion dollar a year industry (UNDP, 2015).

Studying wildlife crime and the responses to it thus requires multiscalar research including the
spaces and sites of extraction, transit, and consumption of wildlife, to the connections and flows
in-between that span the local to the global. This includes spaces of conservation, the open seas,
surrounding communities, ports of entry and exit, global meetings, and (il)legal sites of purchase
and consumption both online and offline (Hansen et al., 2012; Hübschle, 2016a, 2016b; White,
2016). Efforts to combat wildlife crime similarly take us from local areas of sourcing, such as
protected areas (Lemieux, 2014; Lunstrum, 2014), to international forums and regional policing
agreements (White, 2016), and demand-reduction campaigns (TRAFFIC, 2017). Such efforts
involve communities (Massé et al., 2017; Roe et al., 2015) and increasingly more-thanconservation
actors, both state and non-state (Nurse, 2013). Put simply, wildlife crime and the
ways in which it is responded to are not relegated to a certain scale or political-ecological space.

Moreover, while much of the above might reflect or embody familiar geographical, politicalecological,
and socio-ecological dynamics, we are also seeing new and changing dynamics and
spatialities concerning wildlife crime and efforts to combat it (Büscher, Forthcoming). These
dynamics are shaped by a variety of factors including the very labelling of the illicit harvesting
of wildlife as “crime” and those who engage with harvesting as “criminals.” Wildlife crime is
also increasingly framed as a crisis, “war”, or a security issue connected to organized crime and
terrorism that enfold wildlife crime in geopolitical dynamics that are shaping responses to it and
where such responses take place (Büscher, Forthcoming; Duffy, 2014, 2016; Marijnen, 2017).

The result is that wildlife crime, responses to wildlife crime, and the studying of each is taking
place in new spaces and at new scales prompting an engagement with what might be termed
more-than-conservation spaces, actors, and interests. It is these changing geographies and related
political-/socio-ecological dynamics that this session is primarily interested in. Drawing on the
above, there are three key areas of focus for this session:

1. The spaces (and places) of wildlife crime and responses to it;
2. The ways in which the political-ecological and socio-ecological dynamics of wildlife crime
intersect with the geopolitical and political-geographic;
3. How these changes might influence or necessitate new approaches to studying wildlife crime.
Of particular interest are presentations that bring light to novel developments and/or changes to
each with a view to why such changes are occurring and what the implications might be.

Specific topics might include, but are not limited to:
• The changing spatialities and geographies of wildlife crime and the responses to it.
• Legal geographies related to the illicit harvesting of wildlife and the production of
“crime” and “criminals.”
• New understandings and problematizations of what might be considered “wildlife crime”
and wildlife law enforcement.
• The multi-scalar nature of wildlife crime and the connections between local and global
ecologies and political-dynamics.
• Shifting and new geopolitics and political-geographies of wildlife crime and responses.
• The intersection of wildlife crime and related enforcement measures with other sectors
and geopolitical, political-geographical, and political-ecological dynamics.
• Theoretical and conceptual approaches to studying wildlife crime.
• Innovative ways to study wildlife crime and responses to it.

Please e-mail abstracts of up to 250 words to Francis Massé (massef@yorku.ca) and Jared
Margulies (j.margulies@sheffield.ac.uk) by October 20th. Successful applicants will be
contacted no later than October 22nd and will need to submit their abstract online to the AAG
portal thereafter.

Francis Massé, Ph.D. Candidate, York University
Jared Margulies, Post-Doctoral Research Fellow, University of Sheffield

References

Büscher, B. (Forthcoming). From Biopower to Ontopower? Violent Responses to Wildlife Crime
and the New Geographies of Conservation. Conservation and Society.
CITES. (2017). Wildlife Crime. from cites.org/eng/prog/iccwc.php/Wildlife-Crime
Duffy, R. (2014). Waging a war to save biodiversity: the rise of militarized conservation.
International Affairs, 90(4), 819-834.
Duffy, R. (2016). War, by conservation. Geoforum, 69, 238-248.
Hansen, A. L. S., Li, A., Joly, D., Mekaru, S., & Brownstein, J. S. (2012). Digital surveillance: a
novel approach to monitoring the illegal wildlife trade. PLoS One, 7(12), e51156.
Hübschle, A. (2016a). Security coordination in an illegal market: the transnational trade in
rhinoceros horn. Politikon, 1-22.
Hübschle, A. (2016b). The social economy of rhino poaching: Of economic freedom fighters,
professional hunters and marginalized local people. Current Sociology,
0011392116673210.
Lemieux, A. M. (2014). Situational prevention of poaching: Routledge.
Lunstrum, E. (2014). Green Militarization: Anti-Poaching Efforts and the Spatial Contours of
Kruger National Park. Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 104(4), 816-
832.
Marijnen, E. (2017). The ‘green militarisation’of development aid: the European Commission
and the Virunga National Park, DR Congo. Third World Quarterly, 1-17.
Massé, F., Gardiner, A., Lubilo, R., & Themba, M. (2017). Inclusive Anti-poaching? Exploring
the Potential and Challenges of Community-based Anti-Poaching. South Africa Crime
Quarterly, 60, 19-27.
Nurse, A. (2013). Privatising the green police: the role of NGOs in wildlife law enforcement.
Crime, law and social change, 59(3), 305-318.
Roe, D., Cooney, R., Dublin, H. T., Challender, D. W., Biggs, D., Skinner, D., et al. (2015).
Beyond enforcement: engaging communities in tackling wildlife crime: International
Institute for Environment and Development
TRAFFIC. (2017). Consumer Behaviour Change leading to Demand Reduction. Retrieved Sept.
1, 2017, from www.traffic.org/demand-reduction
UNDP. (2015). Combating poaching and wildlife trafficking: A priority for UNDP.
White, R. (2016). Building NESTs to combat environmental crime networks. Trends in
Organized Crime, 1-18.

Local, national, and supranational governments fund coastal restoration and remediation for a multitude of reasons. As local and regional economies restructure, and communities seek alternative futures for coastal areas, actors orchestrate new futures in a variety of ways. In recent years, technological changes have made it possible for coastal regions to formulate and experience richer paths of socio-economic transition, including industries beyond those based upon tourism, resource extraction, and shipping.

Comprehensively several of these new sectors have been incorporated by regional and supra-national policies, such as the EU Blue Growth Strategy, and new necessities to accommodate multiple views, needs, and stakeholders through new planning and policy approaches (e.g. Marine spatial Planning).

The emergence of these new themes has created the need to reframe, and to investigate how to implement and regulate sustainable transition process in coastal regions, with the inclusion of remediation and place-making approaches.

We welcome place-based papers examining the interrelationship between restoration/remediation, economic, and land use change in international or inland waters. Potential topics include but are not limited to:

-riparian zone placemaking;
-Great Lakes Restoration Initiative funding;
-the political ecology of second home development;
-environmental economic geography of marine areas;
-shoreland restoration land use policies and programs;
-heritage placemaking strategies in areas of coastal industry;
-scales of governance and actors’ politics of cooperation; and
-EU Blue Growth Strategy.

Deadline:  Please send your abstract and PIN to Marcello Graziano (grazi1m@cmich.edu), Matthew Liesch (matt.liesch@cmich.edu), or Patrick Heidkamp (heidkampc1@southernct.edu) by 5:00pm on Friday, October 25th.

Session: Geographies of Climate Change Mitigation: Marketization, Financialization, and Decarbonization

Organizers: Mark Cooper (Lund University / University of California, Davis); Wim Carton (Lund University); John Chung-En Liu (Occidental College)

Discussants: Jennifer Rice (University of Georgia); [second discussant t.b.a.]

The ratification of the Paris Agreement marked a new direction for climate governance. In contrast to the Kyoto Protocol, the Paris Agreement employs a bottom-up approach centered on coordinated, cooperative, multi-scalar activities. The Paris climate regime is not only likely to encourage an assortment of strategies for governing greenhouse gas emissions, but will implicate a new set of sites, scales, and actors in the mitigation of climate change. These emerging forms of emissions governance offer the potential for new forms of collaboration and social change, but will also bring new tensions and conflicts.

This growing diversity of strategies, sites, scales, and actors in climate mitigation necessitates that we diversify our theoretical, empirical, and analytical approaches, but also that we build new analyses and explanations that cohere across cases, places, and processes. Drawing inspiration from Bridge et al.’s (2013) analysis of energy transitions, the geographies of climate change mitigation can be said to entail: activities within or across specific territories and economies, the structural and contextual processes that condition mitigation activities, and the generation of new – and uneven – geographies through these activities.

By examining the geographies of climate governance we hope to engage some of the most pressing issues around climate change and society: What form does mitigation take in particular places, and how can we make sense of the development and effect of particular mitigation activities? What roles do different actors and governance structures play in these activities? How do the priorities of different actors align or conflict at different scales? What new geographical trends for mitigation are emerging within the Paris regime?

We aim to organize one or more sessions that bring together critical perspectives on climate change mitigation and the role of markets, finance, and regulation in efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and decarbonize economies. Our aim is for these sessions to bring together perspectives on both the Global North and Global South, to highlight the intertwined character of geographically differentiated processes, and to explore new ways of analyzing and theorizing climate change mitigation. Paper topics could include, but are not limited to:
– Compliance-based policy instruments such as carbon taxes and cap-and-trade
– Programs that encourage the economization of greenhouse gas emissions and the development of low-carbon economies
– Non-state governance programs including private standards and sector initiatives
– Carbon offsetting and offset programs such as CDM and REDD+
– Climate finance and investment in low-carbon development
– The role of economists, policy advisors, private sector actors, and NGOs in the development, implementation, function, or contestation of mitigation programs
– The political economy and politics of greenhouse gas mitigation and decarbonization within particular territories or sectors
– Perspectives on climate justice and responsibility for mitigation post-Paris, and processes of uneven development in the implementation of mitigation programs.

To aid the discussants for this session, presenters will be asked to submit a written paper several weeks before the conference.
Please email abstracts (up to 250 words) to Mark Cooper (mark.cooper@svet.lu.se) by October 21st. We will confirm participation by October 23rd.

The Geopolitics of Digital Media
paper session
Association of American Geographers Annual Meeting
(New Orleans, April 10-14, 2018)

Organizer: Paul C. Adams, Department of Geography and the Environment,
University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX, USA
paul.adams@austin.utexas.edu

Digital media are reshaping geopolitics in complicated ways, from the
cooperation of Wikileaks with Russian hackers, to the colonization of
Facebook by Russian troll farms, to Donald Trump’s use of Twitter to
broadcast insulting nicknames, to alt-right news sites created by
Macedonian teenagers, to the efforts by repressive states to curtail
and control flows of digital information.

The intersections between geopolitics and digital media are most
evident when one observes flows of digital code that carry explicitly
geopolitical messages and imagery. However, data flows that are not
initially relevant to geopolitics also get drawn into geopolitical
processes through psychometric profiling and the targeting of
political messages as communications that would not have been
considered “political” are drawn into political processes such as
elections and referendums through the convergence of social media,
digital surveillance, and the proliferation of databases. These
processes operate within state borders but also cross borders in
slippery ways, blending mediatized politics with mediatized
geopolitics.

This paper session will bring together various perspectives on digital
media and geopolitics. Any paper is suitable that brings together
digital media and geopolitics, whether emphasizing popular
geopolitics, formal geopolitics, or practical geopolitics, and
regardless of the type of digital communication under consideration.

Anyone interested in participating should send an abstract conforming
to the requirements of the AAG (see http://annualmeeting.aag.org/) by
October 21 to Paul Adams (paul.adams@austin.utexas.edu).

Politics of State-Change: Matter and Transition

Call for papers: AAG New Orleans, April 10-14, 2018

Organizers: Dr Ingrid A. Medby (Oxford Brookes University) and Prof. Jason Dittmer (UCL)

Central to the politics of recent months have been concerns with the materialization of particular versions of the past in the present, with Confederate monuments serving as a flashpoint for protest, counter-protest, and bloodshed. The removal of the statues in question (and the white supremacy they materialize) is seen by both sides as a potential existential threshold that will tip the polity into a new state of being.

At the same time, debate continues to rage about climate change and our political responsibilities in the Anthropocene, not least as the US plans to withdraw from global mitigation efforts. Here, the concern is with matter in transition; it is disappearing, appearing, or reappearing precisely due to our lack of action.

Uniting these examples is the politics of presence and absence, of the material and immaterial; and at its core, the politics of matter and its transformation. Political geographers have produced rich bodies of work on both memorializations and materialities, on symbolism, affect, and the more-than-human. What we seek to interrogate in this session, however, is neither the physical absence nor presence per se, neither the solid nor the fluid. Instead, we wish to consider the state-change itself: the political effects of the processual transformation, whatever the cause or matter. From absent to present, or vice versa; from immaterial to material; from land to water to gas, solid, liquid, and air. What do these changes themselves ‘do’ to politics? How can we think of matter in its multiplicity? What are the consequences of something lost, forgotten, backgrounded, or absent reappearing – or vice versa? How are, should and can such change be responded to politically, and/or academically by political geographers? What does it do to our academic work to truly take into account the event of change itself?

We invite papers that consider these broad conceptual issues, with the aim of fostering interesting discussions.  Researchers are encouraged to submit abstracts that relate to topics broadly engaging with the above.

Please email your abstract of no more than 250 words (and/or any questions) to Ingrid A. Medby (imedby@brookes.ac.uk). Please include institutional affiliation, contact details, etc. Successful participants will have to pay the registration fee and submit their abstracts online at the AAG website before October 25, 2017.

Disrupting the Frontier/Homeland Binary: Practices of Local-Scale and Indigenous Development

CALL FOR PAPERS
American Association of Geographers Annual Meeting
New Orleans, April 10-14, 2018

Organizers: Mia Bennett (UCLA/University of Vienna) and Ingrid A. Medby (Oxford Brookes University)
Sponsors: Political Geography, Development Geographies, Indigenous Peoples, and Polar Geography Specialty Groups

In remote, ecologically vulnerable, and/or sparsely populated regions such as the Arctic and the Amazon, global capital and its associated mega-projects are often seen as synonymous with unsustainable, unrelenting growth. In contrast, local initiatives, particularly if directed by Indigenous populations, are often viewed as preferable: “If sustainable development is ever going to be achieved, it needs to begin with citizens at the grassroots level, whereby local success can be translated into national achievements” (Roseland 2012, xviii).

However, an uncritical preference for locally scaled policies and actions may at times be misguided, or at least in need of added nuance. A good deal of geographers and political ecologists assume that while political and economic processes take place at national and global scales, cultural and ecological processes happen at the local scale (Brown and Purcell, 2005). Yet, political and economic processes can and do arise from the local scale too, often running up against global-scale movements that seek, for instance, to conserve the environment. The Arctic offers one example, where entrepreneurial Indigenous groups, like Arctic Slope Regional Corporation in Alaska, champion offshore oil and gas, while Greenpeace continues its campaign to “Save the Arctic.” Local actors – many of them Indigenous – thus often seek the right to development (Gibbs, 2005; Salomon and Sengupta, 2003), at odds with outsiders’ expectations of specific, often romanticized, practices and performativities of both “Indigeneity” and local-scale identities. When Indigenous and local actors are in the race for global capital to fund industrial development on their land, this complicates any supposed binary between homeland and frontier, between passive dwelling and active usage. In a time when decolonizing geographical knowledges has been high on the agenda, questioning assumptions about so-called “rootedness” and “stewardship”, and about what kind of “development” is considered legitimate in accordance with assumed role-enactments, is needed.

This session seeks to explore Indigeneity in the 21st century, especially in so-called “frontier” regions: How it is expected to be performed, how it actually plays out in practice, and not least, how expectations are challenged and disrupted. Recognizing that there is no single Indigenous trajectory, let alone a homogenous “Fourth World,” we seek to stimulate cross-regional dialogues that bring different experiences to bear on one another.

While far from an exhaustive list, possible topics include:

• Geographies of Indigeneity
• Expectations and performances of Indigeneity
• Tribal capitalism, Indigenous enterprise development, and Indigenous political economies
• Practices and policies of Indigenous corporations
• Consequences of land claims agreements on development
• Indigenous resistance to and/or accommodation of the state and capital
• Debates over the “right to development” in regions often perceived as “frontiers”
• Traditional Ecological Knowledges (TEK), and particularly how they might be employed in and/or deployed against development

Please send abstracts of no more than 250 words, along with your institutional affiliation and contact details, to Mia Bennett (mbennett7@ucla.edu) and Ingrid A. Medby (imedby@brookes.ac.uk) by October 23, 2017. We will notify accepted applicants by October 24, 2017. Successful participants will need to pay the registration fee and submit their abstracts online at the AAG website before October 25, 2017.

References

Brown, J. C., & Purcell, M. (2005). There’s nothing inherent about scale: political ecology, the local trap, and the politics of development in the Brazilian Amazon. Geoforum, 36(5), 607-624.

Gibbs, M. (2005). The right to development and indigenous peoples: Lessons from New Zealand. World Development, 33(8), 1365-1378.

Roseland, M. (2012). Toward sustainable communities: Solutions for citizens and their governments (Vol. 6). Gabriola Island, BC: New Society Publishers.

Salomon, M. E., & Sengupta, A. (2003). The right to development: Obligations of states and the rights of minorities and indigenous peoples. London: Minority Rights Group International.