CFP AAG Annual Meeting New Orleans April 10-14, 2018

“White Supremacy and the (Re)Making of America”

Events from the past year in the United States indicate that far from being a “post-racial” society the United States continues to function as a white supremacist, settler state.  The rise of Donald Trump and his not so subtle courting of the alt-right, the growth of extremist groups and the rise of Nazi and Klan organizations, hyper-militarized police response to the Black Lives Matter Protests as well as efforts to build a wall on the Southern border amongst other examples are indicative of the way race operates in the United States.   In addition, we recognize the powerful historical precedents have been structured race relations of our moment. We propose a session that explores the ways in which rearticulations of white supremacy are tied to historically grounded geographic realities of race and empire in the (re)making of America. Specifically, we are looking for papers, of either past or present geographies, that engage with whiteness and/or race and that work through this contemporary racialized moment.  Possible themes for this session include, but are not limited to:

*Historic Geographies of race and racism that explore whiteness and/or white supremacy

*Contemporary processes of racialization and efforts to remake white supremacy.

*Efforts to confront race and racism and broader efforts at decolonization

*The role of Geography in animating specific configurations of place, race and power and related to race.

Those interested in submitting a 250 word abstract should send their submissions to: Joshua Inwood (jfi6@psu.edu) and Steve Hoelscher (hoelscher@austin.utexas.edu) by October 15.

Joshua Inwood, Ph.D.

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) by Monday October 9, 2017. Please include institutional affiliation, contact details, etc.

Successful participants will be notified by October 16, and will have to pay the registration fee and submit their abstracts online at the AAG website before October 25, 2017.

CFP AAG Annual Meeting New Orleans April 10 – 14 2018

“The New (Ab)Normal at Borders”

The events of the past year demonstrated that the world entered a new period of flux and uncertainty at borders. While scholars have noted the expansion of walls, security infrastructure, migrant detention, and militarized enforcement for a decade or more, in 2017 actions that would have been unthinkable even a few years ago became the new normal.

In Europe, the compassion for people on the move that existed in the early stages of the ‘migration crisis’ dissipated as countries built fences and walls and used force to prevent people from moving. Fortifying European spaces against migrants coincided with offshoring of migrant detention and deterrence, such as the EU deals with the troubled Libyan regime to detain people on the move in camps in Libya, despite evidence of the horrendous conditions, violence, and even slavery that occurs there. Italy also began to work with the Libyan coast guard to push boats back to Libya, rather than providing aid and shelter. Migrant aid boats were detained, and their operators were accused of aiding human traffickers.

In the US, newly emboldened Immigration and Customs Agents targeted long-term residents with families and stable jobs for deportation. Plans were made to build new walls on the US-Mexico border, to hire thousands of additional immigration agents, and to cut legislated immigration quotas in half. In Southeast Asia, Malaysia and Thailand put in place new regulations to crack down on migrant labor through registration systems, while the persecuted Rohingya minority, the “most friendless people in the world,” were greeted by slammed doors seemingly wherever they sought refuge in the region. In 2017, in places across the globe, there was a global shift in mood towards nationalist policies and against the rights of people to move.

For the session, we are looking for papers that document and analyze the new (ab)normal at borders. What are the strategies and tactics the state, and non-state actors, use to prevent the movement of people? Where are the locations they are put into place? What impact do they have on people on the move and people who live in the ever widening borderlands? What do these changes tell us theoretically about borders, sovereignty, mobility and the state?

Potential session participants are should contact Reece Jones (reecej@hawaii.edu) and Corey Johnson (corey_johnson@uncg.edu) by 01 October (or earlier) to indicate your interest in participating in the sessions.

[DUAL CALL FOR PAPERS]

AAG 2018 (New Orleans) and Critical Geography Conference 2017 (Penn State)

New Directions in Geographies of Policing, Detention, and Mass Incarceration

Organizers: Geoff Boyce (University of Arizona), Jenna Christian (Pennsylvania State University), and Vanessa Massaro (Bucknell University)

This call for papers invites submissions for two parallel sessions, one at the Critical Geography Conference at Penn State and one at the AAG. We welcome abstract submissions for either conference or both.  Although participation in either session is not conditional on participation in both, it is our hope to build dialogue between these two sessions, with the aim of catalyzing greater disciplinary commitments toward work on these topics, and conversations and relationships among scholars who share these commitments.

These sessions will explore the embedded structural issues and possibilities related to resisting policing, detention and mass incarceration in the United States and beyond. Of course, rich veins of scholarship already speak to various dimensions of these topics, from political economies of incarceration, to the methodological challenges of studying police practice, to intersections between geographies of policing, incarceration and immigration detention and removal (Gilmore, 2007; Loyd, Mitchelson & Burridge, 2013; Coleman, 2016). However, with the emergence of powerful social movements in the United States that challenge racist articulations of police violence (along with a subsequent backlash), we are interested in probing strategies for navigating practices of solidarity and exploring what geography can bring to these efforts through the analytic and methodological sensibilities reflected in our discipline and training. We are eager to explore the host of practical, political, and epistemological problems encountered when “studying up” the state and/or, the everyday practices of state reproduction. We hope to facilitate discussion and explore new approaches to the ongoing challenges involved when approaching research from a commitment to collaboration with those responding (through everyday survival or pointed organizing) to the immediate impacts of state violence in their communities. These sessions will explore how geographic scholarship can support and complement work toward abolitionist futures while pushing a critical dialogue around these topics within the discipline and society more broadly.

Paper topics may include, but need not be limited to:

• geographic articulations of race, racism and policing;
• technologies of monitoring and surveillance;
• criminalization of youth and the school-to-prison pipeline;
• geographies of mobility and immobilities;
• civil forfeiture and financial dispossession;
• family and generational impacts;
• citizenship and immigration;
• social movement responses to state violence;
• everyday practices of care, solidarity and social reproduction;
• the politics of data, access, records and the archive; and,
• the politics of encounter and representation in the context of policing and detention.

If you are interested in participating in one or both sessions, please respond as follows:

Critical Geography Conference (https://pennstatecritcon.wordpress.com/): If you plan to attend the Critical Geography Conference, please send a title and abstract of no more than 200 words to Jenna Christian (jennachristian218@gmail.com) by September 15^th.

AAG: Please send a title and abstract of no more than 250 words to Geoff Boyce (gboyce@email.arizona.edu) and Vanessa Massaro (v.a.massaro@bucknell.edu) by October 1, 2017.

Citations

-Coleman, M. (2016). State power in blue. Political geography, 51, 76-86.

-Gilmore, Ruthie Wilson (2007). Golden gulag. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

-Loyd, Jenna. M., Mitchelson, Matt., & Burridge, Andrew. (2013). Introduction: Borders, Prisons and Abolitionist Visions in Loyd, Jenna. M., Mitchelson, Matt., & Burridge, Andrew (Eds). Beyond walls and cages: Prisons, borders, and global crisis Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press.

Walters, William. 2010. “Deportation, expulsion, and the international police of aliens.” in The Deportation Regime, Eds N de Genova, N Peutz. Duke University Press, Durham, NC:147-165

Call for Papers – Annual Meeting of the American Association of Geographers, 2018

From the Inside Out: Uncovering Administrative Legal Geographies

Legal geographies have laid bare law’s complex action within and against state power. These include delineating spaces of incarceration, protection, and refuge; differentiating public from private and citizen from migrant; and contesting social and ecological injustice from the courts to the streets. Indeed, law’s many contexts and effects embody multiple economic, social, historical, and ecological processes. Accordingly, legal geographies advance theories of performance, knowledge, and governmentality as well as state-making (Braverman et al. 2015, Dean 2009, Mitchell 1991).

Legal administration is no mundane bureaucratic matter, then, but a diverse field of socio-spatial practice across jurisdictions and places. By “administrative legal geographies” we mean the study of these practices and their social, spatial, and environmental implications. Examining them reveals contradictions and limits of global governance, as well as new articulations of (neo)liberal and authoritarian state order.

Yet analyzing administration faces considerable obstacles. Many administrative practices are hidden to non-specialists, securitized, or highly technical. Scholars have often misapprehended administration as purely “procedural,” rather than “substantive” in its own right, an analytically costly separation (Benson 2015).  Many have argued that focusing on administrative practices ultimately detracts from environmental and social justice goals (eg Pulido et al. 2016). Recent research illustrates the import of administrative practice: from institutionalizing exclusionary politics of recognition in postcolonial society (Coulthard 2014), to the limits of rights regimes in protecting people from violence (Spade 2011), to forestalling appropriate responses to climate crisis (Herbert et al. 2013).

We welcome papers from across geography and other social sciences that extend these lines of inquiry to examine administrative legal geographies in substantive, theoretical, or methodological terms. Possible guiding questions include:

• How do particular administrative practices produce and/or depend upon spaces, and with what consequences and ties to wider social dynamics?
• How can we theorize administrative legal processes and practices in ways valid and useful not only to academic geographers, but to other social scientists and practitioners (including lawyers, non-governmental organizations, social movement actors, civil servants, and even the general public)?
• How might ethnographic, textual, participatory, or other methods help to illuminate practices of administration, their consequences, and their analysis? What ethical and logistical issues attend such projects?

If interested, please send the session organizers your name, institutional affiliation, and a paper abstract of up to 250 words by Monday, October 2. We will reply to proposals by Tuesday, October 10.
Session organizers:

Brandon Derman, (bderm2@uis.edu), Department of Environmental Studies, University of Illinois at Springfield
Tiffany Grobelski (tlg6@uw.edu), U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, United States Department of Homeland Security
Jesse McClelland (jmcclell@uw.edu), Department of Geography, University of Washington

References

Benson, M.H. (2015). “Rules of Engagement: The spatiality of judicial review,” in Braverman, I., Blomley, N., Delaney, D., & Kedar, A. The Expanding Spaces of Law: A Timely Legal Geography. Stanford University Press.

Braverman, I., Blomley, N., Delaney, D., & Kedar, A. (2015). The Expanding Spaces of Law: A Timely Legal Geography. Stanford University Press.

Coulthard, G. (2014) Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Dean, M. (2009). Governmentality: Power and rule in modern society. Sage Publications Ltd.

Goodale, M., and S. E Merry. (2007). The Practice of Human Rights: Tracking Law between the Global and the Local. Cambridge Univ Press.

Herbert, S., Derman, B., & Grobelski, T. (2013). “The Regulation of Environmental Space,” Annual Review of Law and Social Science 9: 227-247.

Mitchell, T. (1991). The limits of the state: beyond statist approaches and their critics. The American Political Science Review, 85(1), 77–96.

Pulido, L., Kohl, E., & Cotton, N. (2016) “State Regulation and Environmental Justice: The Need for Strategy Reassessment,” Capitalism Nature Socialism 27(2): 12-31.

Spade, D. (2011). Normal Life: Administrative violence, critical trans politics, and the limits of law. Brooklyn, NY: South End Press.

Call for papers: Geographies of Public Pedagogy

AAG Annual Meeting

New Orleans, Louisiana, USA

April 10-14 2018

Session sponsors: Cultural Geography Specialty Group, Political Geography Specialty Group

Session description: For as much as geography has had to say about public space, it has had relatively little to say about public pedagogy. The latter has more typically been covered in cultural studies and educational studies, but even there it has been approached either in scattershot fashion, or as a concept in need of clarification. In those cognate fields it has come to mean everything from the Progressive Era movement to make primary education public and accessible, to popular culture as an educative force, to informal spaces of pedagogy like museums, parks and public art, to the dominance of certain discourses, to public intellectualism (Sandlin et al, 2011). As we can see, quite a lot falls under what might be termed ‘public pedagogy.’ In geography, Gert Biesta (2012) has usefully distinguished between pedagogy of the public, for the public, and in the interest of publicness. In some ways this distinction grafts onto the vast geographic literature on public space (For example Cassegård, 2014; Castree et al, 2008; Domosh, 1998; Light and Smith, 1998; Mitchell, 2003; Staeheli and Mitchell, 2007; Terzi and Tonnelat, 2017), but the publicness of pedagogy must necessarily involve its own contingencies, difficulties, and particularities. What would a truly public pedagogy look like? In what ways does pedagogy by its nature challenge or limit the notion of publicness (or vice versa)? In what ways would the publicness of pedagogy vary according to context, either spatial or historical? How is it complicated by race, gender or class? How does pedagogy both reflect and construct the public, or better yet publics? Counter-publics (Fraser, 1990)?

This proposed session is exploratory in nature. It is intended mostly to sketch contemporary geographic scholarship on public pedagogy. Thus, most papers loosely related to public pedagogy will be considered. Possible topics include:

• Historical movements re: public pedagogy
• Pedagogical aspects of public monuments, public art, museums and other public spaces
• Issues in public education, including higher education
• Current efforts to make education widely available, including free universities and other radically open spaces
• Critical or radical pedagogy

Depending on the number of submissions this session might have a discussant, so presenters should be prepared to have something to send to said discussant in advance of the meetings.

Please send, title, abstract, contact information including institutional affiliation, and your 9 digit AAG PIN to Kolson Schlosser (Kolson@temple.edu) by midnight, October 12^th, 2017.

Kolson Schlosser

Assistant Professor of Instruction

Department of Geography, Urban Studies and Environmental Studies

Temple University

Philadelphia, PA 19122

References:

Biesta, G. 2012. Becoming public: public pedagogy, citizenship and the public sphere. Social and Cultural Geography 13: 683-697.

Cassegård, C. 2014. Contestation and bracketing: the relation between public space and the public sphere. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 32: 689-703.

Castree, N., Fuller, D. Kobayashi, A. Merrett, C., Pulido, L. and Barraclough, L. 2008. Geography, pedagogy and politics. Progress in Human Geography 32: 680-718.

Domosh, M. 1998. Those “gorgeous incongruities”: polite politics and public space on the streets of nineteenth-century New York City. Annals of the Association of American Geographers 88: 209-226

Fraser, N. 1990. Rethinking the public sphere: a contribution to actually existing democracy. Social Text 25/26: 56-79.

Light, A. and Smith, J. (Eds). 1998. Philosophy and Geography II: The Production of Public Space. New York: Rowman and Littlefield.

Mitchell, D. The Right to the City: Social Justice and the Fight for Public Space. New York: The Guilford Press.

Sandlin, J., Schultz, B. and Burdick, J. (Eds.). 2010. Handbook of Public Pedagogy: Education and Learning Beyond Schooling. New York: Routledge.

Staeheli, L. and Mitchell, D. 2007. Locating the public in research and practice. Progress in Human Geography 31: 792-811.

Terzi, C. and Tonnelat, S. 2017. The publicization of public space. Environment and Planning A 49: 519-536.

— CALL FOR PAPERS —

American Association of Geographers (AAG) Annual Meeting, New Orleans

April 10-14, 2018

Session title:

Migration management and border securitization: intergovernmental organizations and the governance of cross-border migrants

Organizers:

Josh Watkins, Texas A&M

Kira Williams, Wilfrid Laurier University

Abstract:

Geographers have produced an extensive, and growing, literature exploring the rise and administration of border securitization and externalization. This literature shows how individual nation-states, supranational organizations, and multilateral organizations have sought to deter undesired migrants and asylum seekers. Relatedly, an interdisciplinary literature has emerged, organized around the phrase “migration management”, to analyze how intergovernmental organizations like the International Organization for Migration (IOM) or the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) have sought to govern international migration through both discourse and material practice. Too often studies fail to consider the intersectionality of these literatures. This session therefore aims to better understand the intersection between global migration management and border securitization, particularly the role and agency of intergovernmental organizations (IGO). An IGO is an organization composed primarily of sovereign states or other IGOs and usually have an establishing document, such as a treaty. Examples could include UN organizations, the European Union, or Association of Southeast Asian Nations, for example.

The session seeks to explore and explain the logics, projects, means, and outcomes of intergovernmental organizations’ governance of migration and borders.

Papers may focus on:

Migration management and border securitization;

Intergovernmental organizations involved in migration management and border securitization and their discourses or material practices;

The governmentality and/or global governance of migration and forced migration;

Documented or undocumented migrants;

Refugees, internally displaced peoples, or asylum seekers;

Any border, waterway, or world region;

Discursive and/or non-discursive mechanisms of power and governance;

Theoretical models and explanations, empirical studies, or combinations of both.

This session is sponsored by the Cultural Geography, Legal Geography, Political Geography, and Population Geography Specialty Groups.

Please send your proposed title and abstract of no more than 200 words to jrwatkins@tamu.edu by Sunday 15 October 2017. We will finalize decisions by Thursday 19 October 2017.

Call for Papers

Interested contributors should submit an abstract of approximately 250 words or inquiries regarding the session(s) to Tom Stieve (tomthirteen@email.arizona.edu) by October 20, 2017.

Description

This session aims to investigate the effects of globalization on knowledge production throughout the world. Knowledge is socially constructed and undergoes processes of shaping and challenging. Power influences its construct, which can be controlled and contested. Of interest are the economic, social, political and cultural causes and effects on the creation of facts, information, and skills occurring within the integration or interconnection of places in the world. Both resistance to and spread of knowledge can occur at different places over the globe. Some groups challenge the expansion of knowledge from different places viewing it as oppressive or homogenizing, while others have welcomed it as developmental and beneficial. With the rise of populist resistance in the West, a new chapter in globalization is taking place with ramifications on the production of knowledge. Equally important is the possibility of the hybridization of local and global knowledge, where combinations and merging of both scales are created, and clear demarcations are uncertain. In exploring the globalization of the production of knowledge, this session thus seeks to bring together discussions on theory, methodology (qualitative and quantitative), scale and cases studies.

CFP: AAG Annual Meeting, New Orleans, April 10-14, 2018

Invisible Borders in a Very Bordered World: Subversive Political Geographies in the Twenty-first Century

Organizers:

Joshua Hagen (Northern State University)

Alexander C. Diener (University of Kansas)

We are accustomed to visualizing the world as a mosaic of sovereign states, each possessing its own clearly defined territory. Standard political maps of the world help establish, reinforce, and reify this worldview – literally a view of the world – and its taken-for-granted spatial organization. This neat and tidy worldview obviously obscures a great deal of complexity and messiness, both geographical and otherwise. Despite that, this ‘territorial trap’ (Agnew, 1994) continues to exert a powerful hold as a normative framework guiding statecraft, international relations, and popular perceptions of the world and our proper place within it.

In recent decades, scholars have complicated that normative framework by highlighting the apparent proliferation of alternative spaces within, across, and between state borders. The significance of this proliferation, nevertheless, remains unclear. These irregular spaces could be harbingers of new processes and perspectives of bordering. Alternatively, these apparently subversive political geographies might ultimately serve to reinforce and reify conventional norms, behaviors, and mentalities. It may also be the case that these novel borderings are not novel at all; they have been with us all along but merely obscured by the territorial trap.

This session(s) seeks contributions that contextualize, investigate, and illuminate the afore-noted possibilities. Contributions could encompass a wide range of contemporary and historical cases, as well as theories and methodologies, including but not limited to:

• De facto states (e.g. Transnistria or Somaliland).
• Spaces of irredentism and secessionism (e.g. Russian annexation of Crimea or Moroccan control of Western Sahara).
• Unrecognized and ambiguous territories (e.g. South China Sea or Antarctica).
• Gated communities (e.g. wealthy enclaves in developed countries or expatriate retirement communities in Central America and the Caribbean).
• Spaces of ethnic inclusion and segregation (e.g. immigrant neighborhoods or gang territories).
• Novel borderings of commerce and exchange (e.g. foreign trade zones or export processing zones).
• Places of transit and detention (e.g. immigrant processing centers or sites of extra-jurisdictional detention).
• Spaces of indigeneity (e.g. tribal reservations or sanctuaries for uncontacted peoples).
• Micronations (e.g. Freetown Christiania or Principality of Sealand).
• Fractured states (e.g. Libya or Syria).

Despite being ‘invisible’ on most maps, these borders and the spaces they delineate have a very real, material, and tangible presence and consequences for those people who live within, alongside, and across them.

Potential contributors should submit an abstract of approximately 250 words or inquiries regarding the session(s) to Joshua.Hagen@northern.edu by October 13, 2017