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

Entreprepreneurial urbanism 2.0: Local and comparative perspectives

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

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 illustrates 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 Hard and Negri 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-actualisation 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 procedural reading, we uses 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 Friday 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

Davies, W. (2015) The Happiness Industry: How the Government and Big Business Sold us Well-Being. London: Verso.

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

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)

Best, June

June Wang. PhD : Assistant Professor of Urban Studies : Dept of Public Policy : City University o Hong Kong : Phone: (852) 3442 8707 : Email: june.wang@cityu.edu.hk.

CfP AAG 2018 – Contemporary U.S. colonialisms: Crises and Politics.

Organizers: Sasha Davis (Keene State College) and Scott Kirsch (University of North Carolina)

Recent hurricane disasters in Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands, as well as the targeting of Guam during disputes between Donald Trump and Kim Jong Un, have highlighted the dangers and oppressions that accompany contemporary colonial relationships in U.S. territories. Given the continued relevance and impact of colonialism in the current era, this session invites papers that examine the consequences of modern colonialism as well as help develop theories, tactics and strategies – legal and extralegal – for transforming these colonial relationships.

While the political statuses between the U.S. and territorial possessions formalize the second-class citizenship of many territorial residents, the contemporary imposition of colonial processes extends beyond ‘official’ colonies. While there are places with territorial or commonwealth statuses such as Puerto Rico, Guam, The U.S. Virgin Islands, American Samoa, and the Northern Mariana Islands that are clear examples of formally restricted governance, there are other places such as foreign communities hosting U.S. military bases, countries in ‘Free Association’ with the U.S., and culturally distinct spaces within the official boundaries of the U.S. such as Hawai’i and indigenous lands across North America that are subject to U.S. policies, but which have limited or non-existent formal mechanisms for producing or affecting these policies. We therefore invite papers that focus on any geographical context where U.S. colonial political processes continue to operate.

Possible topics can include, but are not limited to:

The production of vulnerability in colonies (environmental, infrastructural, military)

Legal geographies of contemporary colonialism

Colonialism, austerity and neoliberalism

‘Insularity’ as political category

Militarization and colonialism

Research methodologies in colonial contexts

Theoretical perspectives on sovereignty and territory

Case studies of resistance and sovereignty movements

Solidarity activism and colonized places

Migration, mobilities and citizenship in colonial settings

United Nations decolonization processes

Resource extraction in colonial settings

Deadlines:

1. Please submit an abstract or description to the organizers by October 20^th, 2017 for consideration in the session.
2. You must complete your registration and abstract submission at annualmeeting.aag.org/submit_an_abstract by October 25th, 2017.
5. Co-Organizers:                     

Sasha Davis, Department of Geography, Keene State College. Sasha.davis@keene.edu

Scott Kirsch, Department of Geography, University of North Carolina kirsch@email.unc.edu

Session Title: Sorting Youth: Categorization of and Contestation by Children and Teenagers

Organizers: Leanne Purdum (University of Georgia) and Gloria Howerton (University of Georgia)

With this AAG paper session we seek to bring together critical analyses pertaining to the categorization and sorting of children and teenagers in contemporary society, as well as youth resistance to these processes. We encourage participation from scholars who would not necessarily categorize their work as being within the realm of children’s geographies, but whose work centers youth in their analysis.

We are interested in contributions including (but not limited to) topics such as:

• DACA
• Law and policies impacting youth
• School-to-prison pipeline
• School segregation
• Youth migration
• Undocumented Youth
• Categorization and sorting of children
• Racialization and gendering of youth
• Youth activism and organizing/political spaces of youth
• Youth subjectivities
• Uneven geographies of youth
• Military recruitment tactics
• Human rights and youth

Framing of this session:

Until the late 1960s, when William Bunge identified children as our largest minority and argued that they must be brought into geographical studies, human geography focused nearly exclusively on adults, particularly white males (James 1990). While still underdeveloped, Bunge’s work on the spatial oppression of urban youth began a significant increase in scholarship on children’s geographies. Skelton (2013; 2010) recently called upon geographers to treat seriously the political involvements of young people, and previously admonished geographers for treating children and young adults as future people or human becomings. We draw inspiration from Martin (2011), who brings the concept of the “geopolitics of vulnerability” to her analysis of family detention in the US, as a way to bridge the often separated areas of immigration politics and children’s rights. This work sheds light on the complex ways in which youth are categorized, sorted, and framed. With this session, we seek to bring together current research that examines a wide variety of scales to think through the spaces, policies, movements, systems, etc. that constrain, sort, categorize, or are contested by youth.

If interested, submit a 250 word abstract to either Gloria Howerton (gjhowert@uga.edu) or Leanne Purdum (leannekp@uga.edu) by October 13, 2017.

Works Cited

James, S. 1990. Is there a “place” for children in geography? Area. 22(3): 278-283.

Martin, Lauren L. 2011. “‘The geopolitics of vulnerability: children’s legal subjectivity, immigrant family detention and US immigration law and enforcement policy.” Gender, Place and Culture 18 4: 477-498.

Skelton, T. 2010. Taking young people as political actors seriously: Opening the borders of political geography. Area. 42(2): 145-151.

Skelton, T. 2013. Young people, children, politics, and space: A decade of youthful political geography scholarship: 2003-13. Space and Polity. 17(1): 123-136.

AAG Annual Meeting Call for Papers 2018: New Orleans 

Surplus Lives, Race, and Artificial Intelligence

Session organizers

Kate Hall, Dartmouth College, katharine.h.kindervater@dartmouth.edu

Ian Shaw, University of Glasgow, ian.shaw.2@glasgow.ac.uk

Anxieties over artificial intelligence (AI), robots, and systems of automated governance are well documented. The contemporary collision between AI and human labor is generating both old and new problematics for the worlds in which we dwell. The contradictions of capitalist technics and what Marx called “species being” are well-worn ideas. But we might ask how new geographies of poverty, biopolitics, and necropolitics are being manifest by AI. Moreover, beneath concerns with “robots taking our jobs,” big data, or mass algorithmic surveillance, it’s vital to ask how artificial intelligences are entrenching, policing, and exacerbating pre-existing social inequalities. For example, in Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness (2015), Simone Browne analyses the historical conditions of surveilling blackness, thereby situating surveillance within transatlantic slavery and its brutal lines of descent. This demonstrates the politico-ethical importance of fusing capitalist technics with established indignities and injustices. It further points to the importance of interrogating the epistemological frameworks supporting AI and how the human and surplus lives are constructed. That is not to denounce AI as inherently dystopian (a reading that bulldozes difference)-but to always question its geographic materialization or worlding with state and corporate power. In this session, we aim to do just that: discuss the links between surplus populations, inequality, race, and AI. 

If you are interested in taking part in this session, please contact Kate and Ian with an abstract of no more than 250 words by Friday 20^th October 2018 (earlier the better!). We will then get back to you by Monday 23 October with a decision.

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)

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 17, 2017. We will notify accepted applicants by October 21, 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.

CFP 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)

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:

• 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 and that you would like to include with the other topics.

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.

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.

Pedagogies of Race and Racialization

AAG 2018 Panel

Organizers:

Brian Jordan Jefferson, University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign

Jennifer Tucker, University of New Mexico

Our age of resurgent white supremacy requires critical pedagogies of race and racialization. As educators, we are positioned to shape the horizon of the politically possible through engaging students. Yet teaching race is tricky. Miseducation in US K-12 classrooms is commonplace, and some students arrive without basic historical knowledge of racial capitalism, forged in the crucible of slavery and theft of Native lands, and persistent in new forms today. The complexity of racialization requires moving beyond the common binary of black and white to include the diverse experiences of other racialized groups, while still recognizing anti-blackness and settler colonialism as core dynamics of US exceptionalism. There are also pragmatic challenges. Students arrive with vastly different lived experiences of race and racialization. White students, or others with racial privilege, may resist learning about whiteness, or other means of turning toward practices of power and privilege. Educators can expect microagressions in the classroom, even as institutional support to gain competency in navigating racially diverse classrooms is often inadequate. Instructors of color and women may experience more push back when teaching critical perspectives on race than white educators and men.

Despite the challenges, teaching race provides a vital frame for students to see the linkages between critical theoretical frameworks–adequate to the complexity of the concrete–and effective, justice oriented action, that is, to engage with praxis. By rooting race and racialization in specific spaces, with deep histories, geography offers an important set of theoretical resources to help students grasp the processes, stakes and political possibilities of our current moment. Indeed, teaching about racialized space–borders, prisons, sacrifice zones, immigrant detention camps, the plantation, suburban enclaves, ghettos, and slums, to name a few—provides important resources to ground theory and engage students.

This panel will discuss coping devices, knowledge production politics, pedagogical practices, and possible forms of academic resistance. We will also discuss real-world instances in which academic freedom was deprived, and how these instances affect teaching race in geography.

If interested, please send a brief description of your proposed contribution to this panel by October 15 to Brian and Jennifer at bjjeffer@illinois.edu and jennifertucker@unm.edu

CFP: Network analysis and geography

Association of American Geographers Conference, New Orleans, USA, 10-14 April 2018

Walter J. Nicholls                                   Justus Uitermark                                  Michiel van Meeteren

Department of Urban Planning          Department of Sociology                    Cosmopolis, Department of Geography

and Public Policy

University of California, Irvine           University of Amsterdam                    Vrije Universiteit Brusse

wnicholl@uci.edu                                  justusuitermark@hotmail.com          michiel.van.meeteren@vub.be

Geographers have conceived of networks as a foundational spatial concept (e.g. Jessop et al 2008; Leitner et al 2008). In spite of this recognition, the adoption of network analysis within contemporary geography has been varied across geographical subdisciplines. This session departs from the conviction that network analysis heralds considerable promise to develop theoretical notions as well as methods that allow us to better understand how spaces are constituted and contested. This session therefore explores the potentials and limitations of network analysis for human geography.

Demonstrating the relevance of networks as theoretical constructs, scholars like Michael Mann (1986) and Manuel Castells (1996, 2009) have shown how networks of various kinds are constitutive of social power. Networks of people, corporations, and government officials agglomerate in specific locations, with some agglomerations concentrating more resources and power than others.

Network analysis further provides a rich array of techniques and methods that can capture relations in places and across space. Despite the early adoption of network-analytical techniques by both physical and human geographers during the heyday of the spatial science era (e.g. Haggett and Chorley, 1969), contemporary geographers only make limited use of such technological affordances, with notable exceptions of research on city networks (e.g. Taylor and Derudder, 2016) and digital geographies (Crampton et al. 2013).  The growing availability of digital data and the development of advanced techniques for network analysis provide many new opportunities for geography while also raising new issues with respect to research ethics and data validity.

Lastly, network analysis can facilitate conversation across disciplines and subdisciplines. Network analysis provides theoretical notions and techniques that can be used to capture phenomena ranging from social movements and corporate networks to the diffusion of innovation or road infrastructures. Because it provides a common vocabulary, network analysis has the potential to highlight patterns and mechanisms that operate across different fields. While the reduction of complex social relations to a standardized vocabulary offers exciting opportunities, the imposition of network categories can also result in theoretical and political blinders.

The session aims to encourage and inspire scholars to theoretically, methodologically, and empirically explore the potentials and limitations of network analysis for geography. We invite papers from various geographical specializations (e.g. economic, political, social, cultural, transportation, physical and environmental geography) to compare network approaches and build a more comprehensive and dynamic theory of networked geographies.

We particularly welcome contributions that focus on:

–        networks as building blocks of place, territory, scale

–        networks and power

–        the geographical unevenness of network structures

–        the sources of cooperation and conflict within networks

–        the interconnection of networks across domains (e.g. economic, political, environmental and cultural)

–        digital data

–        qualitative and quantitative methods to measure networked geographies

Please submit abstracts of no more than 250 words, names, affiliations and contact information to justusuitermark@hotmail.com, wnicholl@uci.edu and michiel.van.meeteren@vub.be by October 14, 2017 at the latest.

Region as Method

This is a joint plenary session from various specialty groups. scholars from all regional and thematic foci are invited:

Cold War era area studies and traditional regional geography were presented by their proponents as integrative fields – approaches to coalesce macro and micro level analyses of geo-strategic motives, social processes, and political and economic dynamics. In the 1990s, a reiteration of regional geography under the label of New Regionalism (Storper 1997) explored economic processes at the local level, yet maintaining a keen attention to multilevel and comparative sociopolitical dimensions. Since then, the predominance of thematic foci in the discipline – such as political geography writ large, and strands of economic geography such as global value chains and production networks created topical, theoretical, and in some cases methodological division between state-centered analyses in political geography and firms-centered analyses in economic geography. Notwithstanding the claims of geoeconomics to account for the role of the market in larger political decisions, and GVC and GPN roles of the state in governance, it is difficult to account for the liminal spaces in which firms and states actually interact, and, consequently, for the ways in which the increasingly transnational life of firms influences changes in the structure of states.

This session invites reflections on how regional analyses may be able to carry forward more nuanced analyses of the processes tying together firms and states. These include, but are not limited to, new forms of sovereignty and territoriality aimed at regulating but also supporting firms within as well as without borders.

• We welcome regionally focused contributions from economic, political, and cultural geographers that include, but are not limited to:
• Theoretical reflections on the notion of region within geo-economic imaginaries that privilege metaphors of flows over viewing states as static frames;
• The interactions between states sponsored investment promotion practices and firms’ locational choices;
• Commercial and business diplomacy;
• Questioning of the organizational boundaries between states and firms through public-private partnerships and other means;
• Theoretical discussions of the role of states in value chains and production networks, as well as the role of firms in geo-economics;
• Empirical studies of how transnational firms (both large multinationals and small transnational or diaspora businesses), governments, and civil societies communicate their reciprocal interests and mediate conflicts;

Depending on the quality of the papers and inclinations of the participants we will submit a special journal issue proposal. Accordingly, please plan to submit a paper at an advanced draft level.

Please send your abstracts to Christian Sellar csellar@olemiss.edu or Jeremy Tasch jtasch@towson.edu