Call for Papers: “Anxious/Desiring geographies.”
Organizers: Jeremy W. Crampton (Kentucky, USA), Nick Robinson (RHUL, UK), Mikko Joronen (Tampere, Finland)
At this political moment we seem beset by anxieties from every direction. Automation is identified as an existential threat to jobs. Vulnerabilities from political violence increase anxieties of the subaltern. Climate change and the inauguration of the Anthropocene threaten our wellbeing. Nast (2017) credits the financial crisis with being “psychically traumatic.”
At least since Gregory’s identification of the inadequacy of representation, which he dubbed “cartographic anxiety” (Gregory, 1994), geographers have meaningfully contributed to understandings of the affective politics of anxiety. Attention has been paid to a geopolitics of fear that is experienced on both an everyday and global level (Pain and Smith, 2008), and to sexual desires and identities (Bell and Valentine, 1995). Brown and Knopp (2016) have identified a biopolitics of the state’s anxieties in the governance of the gay bar.
In this session we seek papers that deepen our geographical understandings of anxiety, desire and/or the possible relationship(s) between them.
Is anxiety a mental disease that can be diagnosed and treated (APA, 2013), founded on lack, or can it be deployed more positively (Robbins and Moore, 2012)? Is anxiety the only affect that does not deceive (Lacan, 2014)? What is the relation between anxiety, desire and place? What might a politics of locationally affective resistance look like (Griffiths, 2017)? How is desire productive of spaces? How do anxiety and desire circulate and relate to subjectivities and the material body? Are there particular places and spaces that are invested in anxiety or desire, and what is the lived experience there?
Topics that address these questions include but are not limited to:
• Places of anxiety and desire
• Surveillance anxiety (eg., geosurveillance, automated facial recognition)
• Automation anxiety and desires
• The affective politics of policing
• Living in code/space & the smart city and becoming the data subject
• Everyday anxieties
• The biopolitics of anxiety and desire
• The anxious/desiring/desired body
• Affective resistances
• Governing through desire
• Anxieties from political violence
• Affective relations of anxiety/desire to pain, grief, worry or fear
Please send a title and abstract of 250 words to jcrampton@uky.edu, nicholas.Robinson.2014@live.rhul.ac.uk, and Mikko Joronen mikko.joronen@uta.fi by October 15th.
References
American Psychiatric Association. 2013 Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition (DSM-5). Arlington, VA: American Psychiatric Association.
Bell, D. and Valentine, G. Mapping Desire: Geographies of Sexualities. London: Routledge.
Brown, M. & L. Knopp. 2016. Sex, drink, and state anxieties: governance through the gay bar. Social & Cultural Geography, 17, pp. 335-358.
Gregory, D. 1994. Geographical Imaginations. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell.
Griffiths, M. (2017) Hope in Hebron: The political affects of activism in a strangled city. Antipode, 49, 617-635.
Lacan, J. 2014. Anxiety. Seminar Book X. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Nast, H. J. (2017) Into the arms of dolls: Japan’s declining fertility rates, the 1990s financial crisis and the (maternal) comforts of the posthuman. Social & Cultural Geography, 18, 758-785.
Pain, R. and Smith, S. (Eds) 2008. Fear: Critical Geopolitics and Everyday Life. Aldershot: Ashgate.
Robbins, P. and Moore, S.A. 2012. Ecological anxiety disorder: diagnosing the politics of the Anthropocene. cultural geographies, 20(1) 3–19.
Sioh, M. 2014. A small narrow space: postcolonial territorialization and the libidinal economy. In P. Kingsbury and S. Pile (Eds), Psychoanalytic Geographies. Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate.