CALL FOR PAPERS

AAG 2018 – April 10-14, New Orleans

Engaging Southern Theory: Challenging Hierarchies of Knowledge & Place

Amy Piedalue, Australia India Institute, University of Melbourne

Susmita Rishi, University of Washington, Seattle

In the last decade, critical scholars across the social sciences have renewed critiques of geographic hierarchies of knowledge production, and issued a variety of calls for a reexamination of power that questions “the territory of thought itself” (Roy and Crane, 2015).  Several such provocations aim to unsettle geographic imaginations of ‘the global south,’ and particularly to divest from the presumption that ‘the south’ produces only raw data and never theory (Roy & Crane 2015; Roy 2016; Comaroff & Comaroff 2012; Connell 2007). This session aims to extend this call for deeper engagement with ‘theory from the south,’ while simultaneously dislodging fixed geographic notions of ‘north and south’, ‘east and west’. This requires “… a departure from the usual business of intellectual extraction, whereby colonized places and peoples become objectified sources of ‘raw data’. We suggest instead that our imperial present and the histories it calls forth might be better interrogated through [a re-positioning of ‘south’ that] draws attention to power and inequality (rather than reproducing colonial geographic hierarchies of ‘civility’ or modernity). As such, ‘southern theory’ must be charted not onto the colonial maps we’ve inherited, but rather through a process of counter-mapping that values the insights and theories that emerge from positions of struggle and marginality” (Piedalue & Rishi, forthcoming). In this way, ‘southern theory’ might better centralize the operation of power through and in knowledge regimes by instead “view[ing] ‘south’ as a flexible and mobile marker that draws our gaze to the operation of imperial power, manifest in complex inequalities articulated at local and global scales” (Piedalue & Rishi, forthcoming).

In this session, we seek to open a conversation that showcases forms of ‘southern theory,’ which build such theoretical interventions through grounded empirical research and examples. We also recognize and emphasize the importance of learning from theory/knowledge-making that already enacts such a critical ‘southern theory’ approach, including by rejecting white settler, colonial, and imperial geographic imaginaries – such as theoretical interventions made by postcolonial, decolonial and critical race feminisms and/or through centering Indigenous ontologies (i.e. Smith, L.T. 2012; Sandoval 2000; Mohanty 2003; McKitttrick 2006; McKittrick and Woods 2007; Hunt 2013, 2014; Abu-Lughod 2013; Goeman 2013; Lowe 2015; Moreton-Robinson 2015). We envision this conversation to take place in two parts, first as a traditional paper session, then followed by a discussion session. We are interested in empirically-rich research that engages with existing bodies of theory and knowledge produced in ‘the south’, or draws upon feminist and action research partnerships to showcase theoretical insights emerging from commonly marginalized sites of social life, political struggle, and/or economic survival.

For both the paper session and the discussion session, we ask you to send us an abstract of the requisite 250 words. Please be sure to indicate in your email whether you want to be part of the paper or discussion session or both. Please send abstracts to Amy Piedalue (amy.piedalue@unimelb.edu.au) and Susmita Rishi (rishi.susmita@gmail.com) by Friday, October 20^th. We will be in touch by Mon. Oct. 23^rd and will need AAG PINs from participants by Wed. Oct 25^th.

References:

Abu-Lughod, Lila. 2013. Do Muslim Women Need Saving? Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press.

Comaroff, Jean, and John L. Comaroff. 2012. Theory from the South: Or, How Euro-America Is Evolving toward Africa. Boulder, Colo.: Paradigm Publishers.

Connell, Raewyn. 2007. Southern Theory: The Global Dynamics of Knowledge in Social Science. Cambridge: Polity, 2007.

Goeman, Mishuana. 2013. Mark My Words: Native Women Mapping Our Nations. Minneapolis: Univ Of Minnesota Press.

Hunt, Sarah. 2013. “Decolonizing Sex Work: Developing an Intersectional Indigenous Approach.” In Selling Sex: Experience, Advocacy, and Research on Sex Work in Canada, edited by Emily Van der Meulen, Elya M Durisin, and Victoria Love.

Hunt, Sarah. 2014. “Ontologies of Indigeneity: The Politics of Embodying a Concept.” Cultural Geographies 21 (1): 27–32.

Lowe, Lisa. 2015. The Intimacies of Four Continents. Durham: Duke University Press Books.

McKittrick, Katherine. 2006. Demonic Grounds: Black Women and the Cartographies of Struggle. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

McKittrick, Katherine, and Clyde Adrian Woods. 2007. Black Geographies and the Politics of Place. Toronto, Ont.; Cambridge, Mass.: Between the Lines; South End Press.
Mohanty, Chandra Talpade. 2003. Feminism without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity. Durham; London: Duke University Press.

Moreton-Robinson, Aileen. 2015. The White Possessive: Property, Power, and Indigenous Sovereignty. Indigenous Americas. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015.

Roy, Ananya. 2016. “Who’s Afraid of Postcolonial Theory?” International Journal of Urban & Regional Research 40 (1): 200–209.

Roy, Ananya, and Emma Shaw Crane. 2015. Territories of Poverty Rethinking North and South. Athens: University of Georgia Press.

Sandoval, Chela. 2000. Methodology of the Oppressed. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.

Smith, Linda Tuhiwai. 2012. Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples. 2^nd edition. New York: Zed Books.

2nd CFP: AAG 2018

Contesting Border Formation(s): Territory, Crises, and Resistance

Co-organizers:
Vera Smirnova, Urban Affairs and Planning, Virginia Tech
Jared Keyel, Government and International Affairs, Virginia Tech

Borders are politically and socially produced phenomena, they appear as fixed, yet are always in flux. Borders are not merely edges but contested and strategic frontiers, crucial for (re)production of prevalent power relations. Border formation can be exploited to legitimize dispossession, land theft, or the displacement of marginalized communities and, as Agamben (2005) has argued, create states and zones of exception. Border (re)formation in response to the current economic crises and political instabilities has proven to be a disputed process whereby varied constellations of overlapping actors and interests seek to exploit moments of instability to consolidate and exercise power in novel ways.

‘Border’ as a concept has generated much research in the fields of political geography, political theory, and international relations, yet, it has received comparatively less attention than other scales of analysis such as ‘territory’ or ‘space’. Moreover, Anglophone scholarship on border formation, in many cases, is state-centric, primarily seeing borders as a state territorial container or coercive state power strategy (Soja, 1971; Gottmann, 1973; Sack, 1986; Taylor, 1994; Elden, 2009).

This session seeks contributions that contest border formation in the present moment and/or through their historical manifestations, advance understanding of borders that serve at once as a means of coercion and resistance, or perceive borders as lived spaces where both top-down and bottom-up practices overlap and often clash. We invite theoretically rich and/or empirically grounded papers that directly engage in problematizing border formation and together can unite, contribute, or advance the on-going debate.

Topics might include but are not limited to:

If you are interested in joining the session, please send abstracts of up to 250 words to Vera Smirnova (veras@vt.edu) and Jared Keyel (jaredk1@vt.edu) by October 20. Selections will be made by October 23.

References:
Agamben G (2005) State of exception. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Elden S (2009) Terror and Territory: The Spatial Extent of Sovereignty. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Gottmann J (1973) Significance of Territory. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia.
Sack RD (1986) Human Territoriality: Its Theory and History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Soja E (1971) The Political Organization of Space. Washington, DC: Commission on College Geography, Association of American Geographers.

Second call:  AAG 2018

Entreprepreneurial urbanism 2.0: Local and comparative perspectives

AAG Conference 2018

Session organizers: Ugo Rossi (University of Turin, Italy), June Wang (City University of Hong Kong).

Sponsored by: Urban Geography, Political Geography, Cultural Geography, China.

We live in times of ambivalence in which many traditional wisdoms are now revisited/retaken to allow two-sided readings. Gaining centrality of such scholarly debates are cities, which illustrate the ambivalences, contradictions and promises of existing global societies. Using “urban entrepreneurialization 2.0”, this session invites reflections on the present urban process that has unfolded both new-neoliberal economies and insurgent practices of municipal, community-based democracy.

First of all, the term entrepreneurship deserves revisiting. Post-recession societies offer a powerful illustration of what Michel Foucault identified as the ‘entrepreneur of the self’ in his writings on neoliberal governmentality (Foucault, 2005). In this regard, one can observe a qualitative shift with respect to the entrepreneurialization of urban governance that David Harvey brought to light in the late 1980s (Harvey, 1989). The writing by Hardt and Negri (2017) in their recent book Assembly retakes the word to argue for collective bio-political agency of the multitude to demonstrate autonomy in the production in factories and beyond. Nevertheless, the flip side of the happy and self-actualization project promised by “self-entrepreneualism” and “everyone has become an entrepreneur” has also witnessed an array of well documented critiques on self-disciplinary and self-exploitation. With an emphasis put on the procedural reading, we use the term ‘entrepreneurialization of city life’ to call for studies that involve not only the governance structures of capitalist cities but the mobilization of society at large and life itself for both capitalist and non-capitalist purposes.

Amalgamating urban and entrepreneurialization, this session also tends to revisit the machinic assemblage. In other words, how to study the relational interaction of body-environment and the anthropogenetic constitution of urban economies and societies. For some, the ‘mobilizing potential of place’, that is, the ambient power of place is a process of encounter, where various human and non-human elements assemble in a way that particular moral value or social norm is enacted, sensed, felt, and also reacted (Allen, 2006; Roberts, 2012; Thrift, 2007).  For some others, machinic subjectivity is inherent in the ‘cooperative intelligence’ of human being, such that “a multitude is formed capable of ruling and leading itself to conceive and carry out strategic goals” (Hardt and Negri, 2017). In one way or another, today’s urban environments offer evidence of a wide array of practices, projects and experiments – on both capitalist and non-capitalist sides – that draw on what we have defined ‘the mobilizing potential of place’ and the cooperative intelligence of human being.

If you are interested in taking part in this session, please contact June (june.wang@cityu.edu.hk) and/or Ugo (ugo.rossi@unito.it) with an abstract of no more than 250 words by 20th October 2018 (earlier the better!). We will then get back to you by Monday 23 October with a decision.

References:

Ahmed, S. (2010) The Promise of Happiness. Durham, NC: Duke UP

Amin, A., & Thrift, N. (2013). Arts of the political: New Openings for the Left: Duke University Press.

Foucault, M. (2008), The Birth of Biopolitics. Lectures at the College de France, 1978–79, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1987). A thousand plateaus: capitalism and schizophrenia (B. Massumi, Trans.). Minneapolis MN, London: University of Minnesota Press.

Hardt, M., & Negri, A. (2017). Assembly. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.

Harvey, D. (1989) From managerialism to entrepreneurialism: The transformation in urban governance in late capitalism. Geografiska Annaler B: Human Geography 71(1)

 Organizers: Christopher Lizotte^1,3 and Derek Ruez^2,3

We are witnessing an acceleration of human movement across borders, as well as the growing influence of reactionary political movements that have declared themselves in opposition to this movement across a number of contexts. The crises, both exceptional and everyday, facing many of those who cross borders become reimagined as crises facing nation-states. Populist nationalists contest the globalization agenda pursued over the past several decades by political and economic elites, even as they demonize migrants and make claims to imagined national pasts of racial purity and social harmony. At the same time, migrants and their allies struggle against an increasingly normalized xenophobic and fascist ultra-right fringe and often hostile state institutions in order to make space for themselves in receiving societies.

With the upending of the longstanding political coalitions that have been at the heart of the neoliberal globalization consensus, it is more vital than ever to understand how state power, political action, and the structural positionings of political subjects intertwine to produce new spaces in which definitions and conditions for citizenship and belonging are being reworked. Exciting work in feminist geopolitics (Massaro and Williams 2013), the politics of citizenship (Ehrkamp and Jacobson 2015), queer migrations (Rouhani 2016), and geosocial topologies (Mitchell and Kallio 2017), point the way to a broader range of spaces, temporalities, actors, and forces shaping these dynamics—where intimate and everyday lived experience emerges as generative sites of action in and across a plural and uneven world. In this session, we seek to build on these conversations, and we welcome theoretical and empirical contributions that direct attention to the ways structural power intersects with individual and collective agencies to produce new kinds of borders, subjectivities, and citizenships. Such contributions could include, but are not limited to:

• The role of faith-based communities and practices in transnational migration
• How intimate socialities intersect with individualistic and heteronormative migration politics/policies
• The role of educational institutions in reproducing or challenging state geopolitical discourses
• Dominating/missing issues in the current processes of geo-socialisation
• Citizenship as naturalized, contested, and/or experienced
• How rights to be/act as respected members of political communities are gained and lost
• How receptivity to migrants is constructed in a range of sites and institutions
• Which aspects of “geo” are emphasized and downplayed, in current geosocial, geopolitical, and geoeconomic discussions and practices

Please send abstracts of no more than 250 words to christopher.lizotte@helsinki.fi and derek.ruez@uta.fi by October 23th.

¹  Department of Geography and Geosciences, University of Helsinki

² Space and Political Agency Research Group, University of Tampere

³ RELATE (The Relational and Territorial Politics of Bordering, Identities and Transnationalization) Centre of Excellence

References

Ehrkamp, P. & Jacobsen, M. (2015). Citizenship. The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Political Geography (eds. J. Agnew V. Mamadouh, A. Secor, J. Sharp). Wiley Blackwell, pp. 152-164.

Massaro, V. A. & Williams, J. (2013). Feminist geopolitics. Geography Compass 7(8): 567-577.

Mitchell, K. & Kallio, K. P. (2017). Spaces of the geosocial: Exploring transnational topologies. Geopolitics 22(1): 1-14.

Rouhani, F. (2016). Queer political geographies of migration and diaspora. The Routledge Research Companion to Geographies of Sex and Sexualities (eds. G. Brown, K. Browne). Routledge, pp. 229-236.

AAG 2018 New Orleans

New Perspectives on Mediterranean Integration

Organizers: William Kutz (University of Manchester), Camilla Hawthorne (UC Berkeley), Xavier Ferrer-Gallardo (Universitat Pompeu Fabra); Maribel Casas-Cortes (UNC Chapel Hill)

The ongoing effects of the Eurozone crisis and political upheavals since the Arab Spring have significantly altered the established coordinates of Mediterranean space and society. Geographers have sought to explain these phenomena through the changing forms of state borders and territoriality, the spatial re-divisions capital and class, and the contested spaces of migration, citizenship, and belonging. However, much of this research remains largely fragmented along predominant sub-disciplinary concerns, territorial scales, and regional foci.

This multi-session CFP aims to bring together work on Mediterranean integration – in the broadest sense – as a means to traverse these divisions and to place emerging debates into greater conversation with each other.  Our goal is to explore alternative ways to imagine the geographies of Mediterranean sociability and exchange as a means to develop new avenues for future research in the region.

The following themes are proposed as starting points for paper presentations:

• Rethinking borders and migration movements (New Keywords Collective 2014)
• Mediterranean market power (Escribano, 2006; Damro, 2012)
• The constitutive power of outsiders (Browning & Christou, 2010; Cassarino, 2014)
• Geo-economics and internationalization (Smith, 2015; Sellar et al., 2017)
• New/unusual regional formations (Celata & Coletti, 2015; Ferrer-Gallardo & Kramsch, 2016)
• Culture and cosmopolitanism (Dietz, 2004; Moisio, et al., 2012; Giglioli, 2017)
• The Black Mediterranean (Hawthorne, 2017; Danewid, 2017)
• Citizenship, belonging, subalterity (Pace, 2005; Sidaway, 2012)
• Geopolitical fantasies (Bialasiewicz, et al., 2013; Scott, et al., 2017)
• Alternative paths, edges, and nodes (Giaccaria & Minca, 2011; Casas-Cortes, et al., 2013)
• Conflict and diplomacy (Dittmer & McConnell, 2015; Jones & Clark, 2015)
• Comparative Mediterraneanisms (Mansour, 2001; Bromberger, 2007; Whitehead, 2015)

Do not hesitate to get in touch to see if you have an idea that goes beyond the specified themes, or if you already have a session you would like to include with our other topics for greater visibility.

Please email abstracts (250 words) to William Kutz (william.kutz@manchester.ac.uk) by 15 October. Notifications will be sent by 20 October. Participants will need to register and submit their abstracts on the conference website by the 25 October deadline.

References

Bialasiewicz, L., Giaccaria, P., Jones, A. and Minca, C., 2013. Re-scaling ‘EU’rope: EU macro-regional fantasies in the Mediterranean. European Urban and Regional Studies, 20(1), pp.59-76.

Bromberger, C., 2007. Bridge, wall, mirror; coexistence and confrontations in the Mediterranean world. History and Anthropology, 18(3), pp.291-307.

Browning, C.S. and Christou, G., 2010. The constitutive power of outsiders: The European neighbourhood policy and the eastern dimension. Political Geography, 29(2), pp.109-118.

Cassarino, J.P., 2014. Channelled policy transfers: EU-Tunisia interactions on migration matters. European Journal of Migration and Law, 16(1), pp.97-123.

Casas-Cortes, M., Cobarrubias, S. and Pickles, J., 2013. Re-bordering the neighbourhood: Europe’s emerging geographies of non-accession integration. European Urban and Regional Studies, 20(1), pp.37-58.

Celata, F. and Coletti, R., 2015. Neighbourhood Policy and the Construction of the European External Borders. Springer International Publishing.

Danewid, I., 2017. White innocence in the Black Mediterranean: hospitality and the erasure of history. Third World Quarterly, pp.1-16.

Dietz, G., 2004. Frontier hybridisation or culture clash? Transnational migrant communities and sub-national identity politics in Andalusia, Spain. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 30(6), pp.1087-1112.

Dittmer, J. and McConnell, F. eds., 2015. Diplomatic cultures and international politics: translations, spaces and alternatives. Routledge.

Ferrer‐Gallardo, X. and Kramsch, O.T., 2016. Revisiting Al‐Idrissi: The Eu and the (Euro) Mediterranean Archipelago Frontier. Tijdschrift voor economische en sociale geografie, 107(2), pp.162-176.

Giaccaria, P. and Minca, C., 2011. The Mediterranean alternative. Progress in Human Geography, 35(3), pp.345-365.

Giglioli, I., 2017. Producing Sicily as Europe: Migration, Colonialism and the Making of the Mediterranean Border between Italy and Tunisia. Geopolitics, 22(2), pp.407-428.

Hawthorne, C., 2017. In Search of Black Italia: Notes on race, belonging, and activism in the black Mediterranean. Transition, 123(1), pp.152-174.

Jones, A. and Clark, J., 2015. Mundane diplomacies for the practice of European geopolitics. Geoforum, 62, pp.1-12.

Mansour, M.E., 2001. Maghribis in the Mashriq during the modern period: Representations of the Other within the world of Islam. The Journal of North African Studies, 6(1), pp.81-104.

Moisio, S., Bachmann, V., Bialasiewicz, L., dell’Agnese, E., Dittmer, J. and Mamadouh, V., 2013. Mapping the political geographies of Europeanization: National discourses, external perceptions and the question of popular culture. Progress in Human Geography, 37(6), pp.737-761.

New Keywords Collective, 2015. New Keywords: Migration and Borders. Cultural Studies, 29, pp. 55-87.
doi: 10.1080/09502386.2014.891630

Pace, M., 2005. The politics of regional identity: meddling with the Mediterranean. Routledge.

Scott, J.W., Brambilla, C., Celata, F., Coletti, R., Bürkner, H.J., Ferrer-Gallardo, X. and Gabrielli, L., 2017. Between crises and borders: Interventions on Mediterranean Neighbourhood and the salience of spatial imaginaries. Political Geography, pp.1-11.

Sidaway, J.D., 2012. Subaltern geopolitics: Libya in the mirror of Europe. The Geographical Journal, 178(4), pp.296-301.

Sellar, C., Lan, T. and Poli, U., 2017. The Geoeconomics/Politics of Italy’s Investment Promotion Community. Geopolitics, pp.1-28.

Smith, A., 2015. Macro‐regional integration, the frontiers of capital and the externalisation of economic governance. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 40(4), pp.507-522.

Whitehead, L., 2015. Maghreb, European neighbour, or Barbary Coast: constructivism in North Africa. The Journal of North African Studies, 20(5), pp.691-701.

Emergent politics of REDD+ governance

Organizers: Adeniyi P. Asiyanbi (University of Sheffield); Jens Friis Lund (University of Copenhagen)

Emerging in the mid-2000s, REDD+ (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation and the role of conservation, sustainable management of forests, and enhance of forest carbon stocks) quickly became an important symbol of optimism not only for international action on climate change but also for forest governance, biodiversity conservation, market-based environmental governance, and development. However, a decade on, hope in the scheme has plummeted. Not only has the scheme been largely ineffective, we have also seen fears of ‘green grabbing’ materialize despite the development of safeguards. REDD+ discourse has been mobilized for a variety of purposes, including as innovative financing for private wildlife conservation, for a variety of NGO projects and to finance state budgetary deficits. Above all, REDD+ has remained mired in technical and political challenges that raise important questions (Leach and Scoones, 2015; Beymer-Farris and Bassett, 2012; Cavanagh et al., 2015). Increasingly, critical scholars ask whether REDD+ is another fleeting conservation fad (Lund et al., 2017), and whether it might be time to ‘move on’ (Fletcher et al., 2016).

Yet, REDD+ stumbles on, and emergent global environmental imperatives warrant that we critically examine it and its future within the broader global environmental governance arena. The Sustainable Development Goals agreed in 2015, the New York Declaration on Forests in 2014 and the 2015 global climate deal (the Paris Agreement) all give REDD+ a renewed significance (Angelsen et al. 2017; Savaresi, 2016). Meanwhile, outright and outspoken resistance to REDD+ among forest-dependent and indigenous groups across the world is growing, partly in response to failed expectations. And at a more general level, increasing nationalism raises new challenges for multilateral governance of climate change mitigation and REDD+.

This session invites theoretical, empirical and review papers that reflect on the current and future politics of REDD+ governance. Some questions of interest include: How are actors at various levels reacting to the learnings generated over the past decade? In what ways can nations now be seen to be more ‘ready for REDD+’ than they were a decade ago? How are the major international REDD+ institutions interpreting, evaluating and responding to local outcomes of REDD+ implementation? What discursive strategies are being deployed among REDD+ actors to reframe narratives of the poorly performing scheme? We are also interested in contributions that situate REDD+ within the wider global climate change mitigation, forest conservation, and energy debates. Under the emergent global environmental imperatives, we ask: how are REDD+ institutions, structures and processes being reworked? How are these new imperatives shaping the emergent governance of REDD+? Is REDD+ governance undergoing important structural shifts (e.g. from market-based to aid-based; from centric to polycentric approaches)? What are the implications of these shifts?

Please submit your 250-word abstract to Adeniyi Asiyanbi (a.asiyanbi@sheffield.ac.uk) or Jens Friis Lund (jens@ifro.ku.dk) by October 22, 2017.

References

Angelsen, A., Brockhaus, M., Duchelle, A. E., Larson, A., Martius, C., Sunderlin, W. D., … & Wunder, S. (2017). Learning from REDD+: a response to Fletcher et al. Conservation Biology, 31(3), 718-720.

Cavanagh, C. J., Vedeld, P. O., & Trædal, L. T. (2015). Securitizing REDD+? Problematizing the emerging illegal timber trade and forest carbon interface in East Africa. Geoforum, 60, 72-82.

Beymer-Farris, B. A., & Bassett, T. J. (2012). The REDD menace: Resurgent protectionism in Tanzania’s mangrove forests. Global Environmental Change, 22(2), 332-341.

Fletcher, R., Dressler, W., Büscher, B., & Anderson, Z. R. (2016). Questioning REDD+ and the future of market‐based conservation. Conservation Biology, 30(3), 673-675.

Leach, M., & Scoones, I. (Eds.). (2015). Carbon conflicts and forest landscapes in Africa. Routledge.

Lund, J. F., Sungusia, E., Mabele, M. B., & Scheba, A. (2017). Promising change, delivering continuity: REDD+ as conservation fad. World Development, 89, 124-139.

Savaresi, A. (2016). The Paris Agreement: a new beginning?. Journal of Energy & Natural Resources Law, 34(1), 16-26.

Call for Panelists

Anti-racism politics in the city: A Graduate Student Roundtable

Session Sponsored by the Urban Geography Specialty Group 

Session Type: Panel session, roundtable discussion

Organizers: Rachael Baker, York University; Emma Slager, University of Washington

Panel theme: Emerging graduate student research and praxis on urban anti-racist politics

Call for Panelists:

The call to thematically focus on Black Geographies during the 2018 annual American Association of Geographers meeting is, as theme organizers LaToya Eaves are Aretina Hamilton say, timely, and upholds Katherine McKittrick’s declaration that “black matters are spatial matters.” At the same time, the thematic focus on Public Engagement in Geography emphasizes the importance of scholar activism, public pedagogy, and participatory action research. Bringing these two themes together, we acknowledge that the field of geography is bound to the work of colonialism and spatial dispossession  of people of color and argue that to commit to the work and worldings of advancing Black Geographies, there is an additional opportunity to hold ourselves accountable as emerging scholars, to structure our research and methodologies in ways that advance publicly-oriented anti-racist values and practice. Beyond the actual study of anti-racist mobilizations, we seek contributions on this panel from graduate students who take on anti-racism as a practice within their research, reflexively, epistemologically, methodologically, and politically, focusing particularly on work in urban contexts.

Potential topics proposed by panelists could include:
-Urban Afrofuturism(s) and anti-racist worlding
-Anti-racist methodologies
-Critical epistemological practices
-Anti-racist and public pedagogies
-Positionality and anti-racist ethics
-Anti-racism and fieldwork
-Anti-racism and public scholarship

Submission Procedure:

Graduate students who are interested in taking part in this roundtable discussion should submit two questions that guide your research, as well as a brief synopsis (300 words max) outlining how you integrate anti-racism politics into your urban geographic research and praxis. The questions that shape our discussion will be drawn directly from the submissions of selected panelists. Accepted panelists will also be asked to submit 4-5 annotated references that inspire your research. These annotated sources will be distributed among panel participants to help broaden the range of sources we use in our work and will be made available to audience members as a ‘take-away’ from the session.

If you are interested in participating, please send your submission to Rachael Baker (baker87@yorku.ca) and Emma Slager (ejslager@uw.edu) by October 18, 2017. Selected participants will be notified by October 20, 2017 and will then need to register for the 2018 AAG by October 25th. Please note that this is a panel session, so you will not need to submit an abstract to the AAG for this session though you will need to register and provide the session organizers with your PIN. AAG registrants may be a panelist in one session, in addition to one session for which they submit an abstract.

Call for Papers
AAG 2018, New Orleans
Apologies for Cross-posting

Session: Celtic Geographies

Co-organizers:

Mark Rhodes, Kent State University

Kathryn Hannum, Kent State University

Almost 20 years ago David C. Harvey, Rhys Jones, Neil McInroy, and Christine Milligan published their edited volume, Celtic Geographies: Old culture, new times. While this work highlighted and raised awareness of the “Celtic Fringe” (and beyond), much has occurred in the past two decades. From the continual development of devolved politics and nationalism in Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland, to the effect of Brexit on the Celtic nations, to the greater recognition of Galicia and Asturias as part of the Celtic Fringe, the time has arrived for a renewed interest and debate on Celtic geographies within the field of geography.

The goal of this paper session is to provide a platform for presentations ranging from pan-Celtic to individual case studies. With focuses on devolution, nation building, Brexit, non-traditional Celtic cases, performing Celticness, identity, colonialism, etc… we hope to connect scholars with diverse topical, methodological, and regional focuses through the medium of Celtic geographies.

If you are interested in participating in this session, please email either Mark Rhodes (mrhode21@kent.edu) or Kathryn Hannum (khannum1@kent.edu), including your paper title and abstract, by October 20^th.

Call for Papers: New spaces of bordering, citizenship, and political subjectivity

AAG, New Orleans 2018

 Organizers: Christopher Lizotte^1,3 and Derek Ruez^2,3

We are witnessing an acceleration of human movement across borders, as well as the growing influence of reactionary political movements that have declared themselves in opposition to this movement across a number of contexts. The crises, both exceptional and everyday, facing many of those who cross borders become reimagined as crises facing nation-states. Populist nationalists contest the globalization agenda pursued over the past several decades by political and economic elites, even as they demonize migrants and make claims to imagined national pasts of racial purity and social harmony. At the same time, migrants and their allies struggle against an increasingly normalized xenophobic and fascist ultra-right fringe and often hostile state institutions in order to make space for themselves in receiving societies.

With the upending of the longstanding political coalitions that have been at the heart of the neoliberal globalization consensus, it is more vital than ever to understand how state power, political action, and the structural positionings of political subjects intertwine to produce new spaces in which definitions and conditions for citizenship and belonging are being reworked. Exciting work in feminist geopolitics (Massaro and Williams 2013), the politics of citizenship (Ehrkamp and Jacobson 2015), queer migrations (Rouhani 2016), and geosocial topologies (Mitchell and Kallio 2017) point the way to a broader range of spaces, temporalities, actors, and forces shaping these dynamics-where the intimate and everyday lived experience emerge as generative sites of action in and across a plural and uneven world. In this session, we seek to build on these conversations, and we welcome theoretical and empirical contributions that direct attention to the ways structural power intersects with individual and collective agencies to produce new kinds of borders, subjectivities, and citizenships. Such contributions could include, but are not limited to:

• The role of faith-based communities and practices in transnational migration
• How intimate socialities intersect with individualistic and heteronormative migration politics/policies
• The role of educational institutions in reproducing or challenging state geopolitical discourses
• Dominating/missing issues in the current processes of geo-socialisation
• Citizenship as naturalized, contested, experienced, and/or enacted
• How rights to be/act as members of political communities are gained and lost
• How receptivity to migrants is constructed in a range of sites and institutions
• Which aspects of “geo” are emphasized and downplayed, in current geosocial, geopolitical, and geoeconomic discussions and practices

Please send abstracts (up to 250 words) to christopher.lizotte@helsinki.fi and derek.ruez@uta.fi by October 23rd.

¹  Department of Geography and Geosciences, University of Helsinki

² Space and Political Agency Research Group, University of Tampere

³ RELATE (The Relational and Territorial Politics of Bordering, Identities and Transnationalization) Centre of Excellence

References

Ehrkamp, P. & Jacobsen, M. (2015). Citizenship. The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Political Geography (eds. J. Agnew V. Mamadouh, A. Secor, J. Sharp). Wiley Blackwell, pp. 152-164.

Massaro, V. A. & Williams, J. (2013). Feminist geopolitics. Geography Compass 7(8): 567-577.

Mitchell, K. & Kallio, K. P. (2017). Spaces of the geosocial: Exploring transnational topologies. Geopolitics 22(1): 1-14.

Rouhani, F. (2016). Queer political geographies of migration and diaspora. The Routledge Research Companion to Geographies of Sex and Sexualities (eds. G. Brown, K. Browne). Routledge, pp. 229-236.