CfP: Taxation, Accumulation, and the State

Call for Papers: Taxation, Accumulation, and the State
Organizers: Kelly Kay (UCLA) and Renee Tapp (Clark University)
Sponsored by the Economic Geography Specialty Group and Political Geography Specialty Group
The global surge of populist politics has ushered in calls from both the right and left for radical transformation of the existent tax codes (Kumar 2017, Morgan 2017, Travis and Inman 2017).  As the single most important tool the state has at its disposal to restrict or enable accumulation, changes to taxation policies and practices mean nothing less than the reimagining the state itself (Cameron 2008), particularly with regard to its relationship to capital. In the US and the UK, the last major tax shake-ups were the comprehensive reforms that occurred under Reagan and Thatcher respectively.  Today, those overhauls have devolved into a tax climate characterized by (i) loopholes and the normalization of tax evasion (Wainwright 2011), (ii) proprietary accounting practices that have institutionalized distinct accumulation and governance strategies (McNeill 2017), and (iii) tax benefits for real estate investment that have opened up all forms and geographies of property and land to financialization (Kay 2017, Gunnoe 2014, Weber 2010, Gotham 2006, Coakley 1994).  Although financialized strategies of capital accumulation have been extensively researched by geographers, few studies have articulated a comprehensive understanding of the tax regimes that underlie these processes in the 21st century.
This session aims to bring together scholars working on a broad range of topics related to taxation in order to better understand the centrality that tax policies and the tax code play in capitalist strategies, regulation, and state-building.  In addition to examining the evolution of tax regimes, evaluating taxation today means understanding the possibilities and limitations of current and future tax schemes in achieving democracy and justice (Braithwaite 2002).  Our goal is to establish a shared understanding of the contours of contemporary taxation and to delineate what is at stake in future tax reform.
We invite papers that make empirical engagements or theoretical interventions in that are concerned in a broad range of ways with the intersections of taxation and geography. Themes include but are not limited to:
• The impacts of particular tax legislation or regulation, including those that span the “urban/rural divide”
• Historical geographies of taxation
• Legal geographies or fiscal geographies and the production of space
• Urban fiscal geographies and finance
• The role of the tax code or tax norms in (re)producing racial, gendered, or class-based forms of discrimination
• Alternative tax structures and/or the political dimensions of tax redistribution
• The role of tax professionals, including by not limited to accountants, appraisers, and consultants in governance and knowledge transfer
Please send 250 word abstracts to kkay@geog.ucla.edu and ctapp@clarku.edu by October 15, 2017.
References:
Braithwaite, V., ed. 2002. Taxing Democracy. Farnham, UK: Ashgate.
Cameron, A. 2008. Crisis? What Crisis? Displacing the Spatial Imaginary of the Fiscal State. Geoforum 39(3): 1145-1154.
Chassany, AS., and M. Stothard. 2017. French PM Says Tax Cuts for Wealthy May Come in 2018. Financial Times 10 July https://www.ft.com/content/9a7b55be-654b-11e7-9a66-93fb352ba1fe.
Coakley, J. 1994. The Integration of Property and Financial Markets. Environment and Planning A 26: 697-713.
Gotham, K. 2006. The Secondary Circuit of Capital Revisited: Globalization and the U.S. Real Estate Sector. American Journal of Sociology 112(1): 231-275.
Gunnoe, A. 2014. The Political Economy of Institutional Land Ownership: Neorentier Society and the Financialization of Land. Rural Sociology 79: 478-504.
Kay, K. 2017. Rural Rentierism and the Financial Enclosure of Maine’s Open Lands Tradition. Annals of the American Association of Geographers: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/24694452.2017.1328305.
Kumar, M. 2017. Modi Set to Launch India’s Biggest Tax Reform Amid Protests. Reuters. http://www.reuters.com/article/us-india-tax-idUSKBN19K13U
McNeill, D. 2017. Global Cities and Urban Theory. London: Sage Publications.
Morgan. 2017. US House Speaker Vows to Complete Tax Reform in 2017. Reuters.  http://www.reuters.com/article/usa-congress-tax-idUSL1N1JG1YZ.
Travis, A., and P. Inman. 2017. Labour Manifesto 2017: the Key Points, Pledges and Analysis. The Guardian 1 June.
Wainwright, T. 2011. Tax Doesn’t Have to Be Taxing: London’s ‘Onshore’ Finance Industry and the Fiscal Spaces of a Global Crisis. Environment and Planning A 43(6): 1287-1304.
Weber, R. 2010. Selling City Future: the Financialization of Urban Redevelopment Policy. Economic Geography 86(3): 251-274.

CfP: The New (Ab)Normal at Borders

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 15 September (or earlier) to indicate your interest in participating in the sessions.

CfP: Geopolitics of Displacement and Exclusion: Making and Unmaking of Refugees

Geopolitics of Displacement and Exclusion: Making and Unmaking of Refugees

 AAG, April 10-14, 2018

New Orleans, LA

Organizers: Kara Dempsey (Appalachian State University) and Orhon Myadar (University of Arizona)

 

As the number of refugees reaches record high globally, refugee issues have been brought to the forefront of political and public debates both nationally and internationally. The public views towards these refugees have been shaped by various mediums that disseminate images and ideas of and about refugees.

This session seeks to conceptualize refugee migration as a critical geopolitical issue and examine the theoretical and practical assumptions surrounding the humanitarian crisis. Invoking Judith Butler’s Precarious Life and Giorgio Agamben’s Bare Life, the session aims to explore the politics of making and unmaking refugees at different scales and in different milieus. Central to our understanding of the politics of refugees is the contradiction between the basic International Relations assumption based on the sanctity of the states and the forces that defy the assumption and the rigidity that comes with it. In exploring the processes of making and unmaking refugees within this contradiction, this session thus seeks to bring together discussions on topics including but not limited to: geopolitics of displacement and bordering (that of exclusion and inclusion; the travel ban); the biopolitics of making/unmaking refugees (coding, registration, incarceration, representation, exploitation and subjugation of refugee bodies); precariousness of refugee lives; refugee stories (production, narration, animation, fetishizing and silencing of refugee narratives; documenting refugee voices), racializing and essentializing tropes of refugees.

Interested contributors should submit an abstract of approximately 250 words to Kara Dempsey (dempseyke@appstate.edu) and Orhon Myadar (orhon@email.arizona.edu) by October 10, 2017.

CfP: Planetary Illiberal Geographies: Territories, Space and Power

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

Title: Planetary Illiberal Geographies: Territories, Space and Power

Organizers: Jason Luger (UC-Berkeley) and Sarah Tynen (University of Colorado-Boulder)

Sponsored by: Political Geography Specialty Group and Urban Geography Specialty Group

 

Welcome to the illiberal age.

Writing about liberal democratic contexts, Lefebvre (2009 [1978]) argues that state territorial control facilitates capital accumulation. But what happens in the relationship between the state, territory, and capital in illiberal political contexts? While some scholarship in geography has addressed the relationship between sovereignty and territory (Yeh 2013), such as in the context of violence (Elden 2009) and state power (Jessop 2007), more scholarship is needed to address the implications of authoritarian governance on multiple scales in relationship to territory and economic development. Furthermore, political geographers like Koch (2013, 2016) have stressed the importance of moving beyond ‘territorial traps’ and ‘moral geographies’ to better understand the relational nature of illiberalism and the circular, rather than hierarchal, flows of power (Foucault 2007) in and across various scales.

Meanwhile, theorists such as Brenner and Schmid (2015) propose that urban processes are planetary in nature, multi-scalar, hybrid and relational in nature. Given the surge in illiberalism around the world, it is crucial to explore both fixed territories and the ways in which these territories combine via global circuits and flows. Furthermore, illiberalism is not limited to particular places, global regions, or physical territory at all. Various forms of illiberalism, from authoritarian state-society relations to religious fundamentalism, show up in ‘East and West’, ‘North and South’, in cyberspace and in urban neighborhoods.

Thus, this paper session seeks to further explore diverse terrains of ‘illiberal’ geographies, specifically how illiberal regimes articulate territory and space at scales both global and local, through lenses such as city planning, policy, surveillance, or economic development. This paper session seeks a full range of theoretical and methodological approaches to examine territory, space and power in the new global illiberal paradigm, from China and East Asia through the Middle East to Africa and Trump’s America (and all the interstices in between). We welcome theoretical and empirical debates, as well as papers dealing with the methodological challenges in approaching illiberal geographies.

 

Interested applicants should send an abstract of no more than 250 words to Jason Luger (jdluger@berkeley.edu) and Sarah Tynen (sarah.tynen@colorado.edu) by October 4th. Accepted applicants will be notified by October 11th.

 

Papers may focus on, but are not limited to:

  • Urban development, planning and design as a mechanism of multi-scalar development and control
  • Methodological and ethical challenges for researchers operating in / approaching illiberal contexts
  • Illiberal encounters in urban space and cyberspace
  • Urban planning and environment design as a mode of territorial control
  • Borders, mobility, and state territorial control through border policing
  • Settler colonialism and militarization of disputed territory
  • Geographies of law and law enforcement
  • Everyday dimensions of territorial policing, securitization, surveillance, and violence
  • Resistance to state territorial control
  • Policing of the body and resistance to it
  • Neighborhood governance and state surveillance tactics

References

Brenner, N. and Schmid, C., 2015. Towards a new epistemology of the urban?. City, 19(2-3),

pp.151-182.

Elden, Stuart. 2009. Terror and Territory: The Spatial Extent of Sovereignty. Minneapolis:

University of Minnesota Press

Foucault, Michel. 2007. Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France

1977–1978. New York: Picador.

Jessop, B. 2007. State Power. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press.

Koch, N. (2013) Introduction: field methods in ‘closed contexts’: Undertaking research in

authoritarian states and places. Area, 45(4), 390-395.

Koch, N. (2016) We entrepreneurial academics: governing globalized higher education in

‘illiberal’ states, Territory, Politics, Governance, 4(4), 433-452.

Lefebvre, Henri. 2009 [1978]. Space and the State. In State, Space, World: Selected Essays, N.

Brenner and S. Elden, eds., 95-123. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Yeh, Emily. 2013. Taming Tibet: Landscape Transformation and the Gift of Chinese

Development. Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press.

CfP: Geopolitical Ecologies: Nature, States, and Governance

— CALL FOR PAPERS —
American Association of Geographers (AAG) Annual Meeting
New Orleans, Louisiana, April 10-14, 2018

Geopolitical Ecologies: Nature, States, and Governance

Organizers: Clare Beer (UCLA) & Sara Hughes (Mount Holyoke College)
Discussant: Leila Harris (UBC)

Sponsored by the Political Geography Specialty Group, Cultural and Political Ecology (CAPE) Specialty Group, Development Geographies Specialty Group, & Middle East and North Africa Specialty Group

Nature plays a seminal role in the production of political space, yet political geographers have been slow to theorize the non-human world in relation to core disciplinary concepts like borders, power, sovereignty, the state, and territory/territoriality (Ramutsindela, 2017; Robbins, 2008). As a wider consequence, they have overlooked important connections between nature and political society. Political ecologists, meanwhile, mine these connections through a ‘chains of explanation’ methodology linking ecological change to uneven relations of social, economic, and political power. Despite their emphasis on politics, political ecologists have been less explicit about the state itself and why it matters to the non-human world (Robertson, 2015).

This session premises that political geographers excel where political ecologists fall short and vice versa (Robbins, 2003), leaving obvious room for each to draw important insights from the other. We argue that their cross-pollination is not only possible but would produce novel insights into processes of modern statecraft and global environmental change. For political geographers, deeper engagement with nature would expand the kinds of spaces that pertain to the geopolitical register and address how the sovereign state system could better manage global-scale environmental crises. For political ecologists, an encounter with state and/or political-geographic theory would sharpen explanations of environmental problems and render more nuanced pictures of the environmental state. This session builds on recent conversations between and within these subfields (Dalby, 2013; Harris, 2012; Parenti, 2015), and emerging research on the ‘political geography of the environment’ (Benjaminsen et al., 2017) and ‘political ecologies of the state’ (Harris, 2017), to open new space for collaboration.

We mobilize Bigger and Neimark’s (2017) ‘geopolitical ecology’ framework to drive our discussion, but encourage a wider reading of ‘geopolitics’ beyond the military-industrial. In particular, we seek to address the relationship between, on the one hand, environmental governance, sustainability, and climate change policy, and, on the other, geostrategy and statecraft. We are interested in how and why states manage their territorial environments to strategic effect, and the ways in which the material realities of nature complicate or subvert such actions.

Papers may address any number of topics related to ‘geopolitical ecologies,’ including but not limited to:  

  • Theoretical, empirical, and/or methodological interventions that critically (re)assess the nature-state relationship
  • Ecological legibility and the state
  • Eco-state restructuring
  • The role of non-human actors in geopolitical processes (cf. Sundberg, 2011)
  • Climate change adaptation/mitigation and statecraft (cf. Camargo & Ojeda, 2017)
  • New hegemonies of ‘green’ political-economic power
    • ‘Green’ developmentalism and the state
  • War/violence and biodiversity/resource conservation
  • Settler-colonial environmentalisms

Interested applicants should send abstracts of no more than 250 words to Sara Hughes (snhughes@mtholyoke.edu) and Clare Beer (clarebeer@ucla.edu) by October 16th. Accepted applicants will be notified by October 23rd. *Note: to enhance the quality of discussion, session participants must submit brief conference papers (approx. 10 pp.) to the session organizers by March 12, 2018.

References

Benjaminsen, T. A., Buhaug, H., McConnell, F., Sharp, J., & Steinberg, P. E. (2017). Political Geography and the environment. Political Geography, 56, A1–A2.
Bigger, P., & Neimark, B. D. (2017). Weaponizing nature: The geopolitical ecology of the U.S. Navy’s biofuel program. Political Geography, 60, 13–22.
Camargo, A., & Ojeda, D. (2017). Ambivalent desires: State formation and dispossession in the face of climate crisis. Political Geography, 60, 57–65.
Dalby, S. (2013). The geopolitics of climate change. Political Geography, 37, 38–47.
Harris, L. M. (2012). State as socionatural effect: Variable and emergent geographies of the state in southeastern Turkey. Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, 32(1), 25–39.
Harris, L. M. (2017). Political ecologies of the state: Recent interventions and questions going forward. Political Geography, 58, 90–92.
Parenti, C. (2015). The 2013 ANTIPODE AAG lecture: The environment making state: Territory, nature, and value. Antipode, 47(4), 829–848.
Ramutsindela, M. (2017). Greening Africa’s borderlands: The symbiotic politics of land and borders in peace parks. Political Geography, 56, 106–113.
Robbins, P. (2003). Political ecology in political geography. Political Geography, 22, 641–645.
Robbins, P. (2008). The state in political ecology: A postcard to political geography from the field. In K. R. Cox, M. Low, & J. Robinson (Eds.), The SAGE handbook of political geography (pp. 205–218). Los Angeles; London; New Delhi; Singapore: SAGE Publications.
Robertson, M. (2015). Environmental governance: Political ecology and the state. In T. Perreault, G. Bridge, & J. McCarthy (Eds.), The Routledge handbook of political ecology (pp. 457–466). London; New York: Routledge.
Sundberg, J. (2011). Diabolic caminos in the desert and cat fights on the río: A posthumanist political ecology of boundary enforcement in the United States–Mexico borderlands. Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 101(2), 318–336.

AAG Fellows & AAG Awards

Please note the following AAG nominations being solicited at the moment:

AAG Fellows
http://www.aag.org/aag_fellows
The AAG Fellows is a new program to recognize geographers who have
made significant contributions to advancing geography. In addition to
honoring geographers, AAG Fellows will serve the AAG as an august body
to address key AAG initiatives including creating and contributing to
AAG initiatives; advising on AAG strategic directions and grand
challenges; and mentoring early and mid-career faculty. Similarly to
other scientific organizations, the honorary title of AAG Fellow is
conferred for life. Once designated, AAG Fellows remain part of this
ever-growing advisory body.

AAG Honors
http://www.aag.org/honors
AAG Honors are the highest awards offered by the American Association
of Geographers. They are offered annually to recognize outstanding
accomplishments by members in research & scholarship, teaching,
education, service to the discipline, public service outside academe
and for lifetime achievement. Currently, honors are awarded in
several categories, including:
– Distinguished Teaching Honors
– Gilbert F. White Distinguished Public Service Honors
– Ronald F. Abler Distinguished Service Honors
– Gilbert Grosvenor Honors for Geographic Education
– Distinguished Scholarship Honors
– Lifetime Achievement Honors
– Media Acheivement Award
– Publication Award

PGSG Business Meeting reminder

Please remember to join us for the PGSG Business Meeting today, Friday, April 7, from 11:50 am –1:10 pm in the Marriott Clarendon Room, 3rd  Floor. We will announce the student and non-student award winners, vote on the new Board members, and discuss a number of other logistical items.

Preconference Abstracts

Submit your abstracts by Feb. 1 for the Political Geography Specialty Group’s 30th annual Preconference at Harvard University. Our gathering this year will be on April 4, 2017 (a Tuesday) and is hosted and supported by Harvard’s Center for Geographic Analysis, the Institute for Quantitative Social Science, and the Department of Government.

Abstracts of 250 words or less should be submitted to aag.pgsg@gmail.com and are best submitted as attachments in MS Word. That document should also include your name, department, institutional affiliation, and e-mail address as you want those items listed in the program. This year we welcome both paper and POSTER presentations so please clarify in your abstract document (as well as your submission e-mail subject line) the type of presentation for which you would like to be scheduled.

For additional details and inquiries: https://www.politicalgeography.org/pre-conference/
or e-mail: aag.pgsg@gmail.com

You may also contact organizers individually:
Natalie Koch, PGSG President <nkoch@maxwell.syr.edu>
Kenneth Madsen, PGSG Secretary/Treasurer <madsen.34@osu.edu>

Please do not contact local hosts.