Call For Papers
AAG 2017 Boston (April 5-8, 2017)

Session title: Practical pragmatism: Towards a ‘post-critical’ urban political geography?

Organizers: Laura Cesafsky, University of Minnesota

Ryan Holifield, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee

We are seeing a ‘slow turn’ towards pragmatism across political geography, evidenced by a growing interest in American philosophical figures like Dewey, Peirce and James. A 2008 Geoforum special issue on ‘Pragmatism and Geography’ was an early touchstone (Wood & Smith 2008). Contributors unearthed an array of themes of possible value in this unwieldy tradition that the Italian futurist Giovanni Papini described as ‘lying in the midst of our theories, like a corridor in a hotel’ (cited in James, 1907). In his contribution to the special issue, for example, Jones (2008) cited “the primacy of life and action, pluralism, materiality/spatiality/temporality/relationality, anti-essentialism, creativity, collectivity, fallibilism, and disorder in method” as possible pragmatic contributions to geography.
We fear the scope of these discovered (potential) uses may have had the unintended effect of dulling conversation around pragmatism rather than enlivening it. In other words, we fear that geographers have not been pragmatic enough about pragmatism, moving by habit toward first principles and ‘metaphysical ground-maps’ (Cutchin 2008) rather than doing what pragmatists insist we must: start from the practical problems that face us and emphasize the practical application of the knowledge we make. To that end, in this session we invite papers that turn to pragmatic ideas in an effort to overcome concrete impasses in (urban) geographical thought and practice. We identify three ‘urban geographical obstacles’ for debate that are actually motivating the turn to pragmatism among scholars today (and we welcome additional problems from contributors to the session):

1) The problem of politics. What counts? There is dissatisfaction in urban geography with the limits of ‘post-political’ and Marxian theories that specify too much, obscuring the diverse processes by which knowledges, desires, and claims are constructed. On the other hand, the idea that ‘everything is political’ or that politics is identical with the composition of the common world is equally dissatisfying. Geographers are turning to pragmatism (Holifield & Schuelke 2015; Bridge 2014; Barnett & Bridge 2013; Agnew 2011) in order to define a politics between these poles [and in-step with Latour (2013), who has turned to Dewey to ‘autocorrect’ his own composition-as-politics problem].

2) The problem of critique. How to move past it? Braun (2015) and Woodyer and Geoghagen (2013) speculate about a ‘post-critical’ political ecology. Might the same happen in urban geography? Critical urban theory has helped us understand the production of space and the uneven distribution of social goods, but pragmatism insists that experimentation is necessary to gain knowledge and create new forms of urban life and politics. Geographers debate actually-existing experimentalism in cities (Bulkeley et. al year; Evans et. al 2016). But what of experimentalism as research practice, as widely discussed (Last 2012; Harney et. al 2016) and rarely modeled (but see Whatmore 2013)—a practice that alters conditions and examines the results, allows new normativities to emerge, and makes researchers less paranoid and detached and more embroiled and open to surprise (Sedgwick 1997)?

3) The problem of democracy. What makes democratic action possible? Related to the problem of critique, the prevailing mode of democratic research among critical geographers is the unmasking of betrayals and contradictions. Pragmatism offers an account of democracy as a distributed, experimental practice of working on the issues that affect us (Lake 2016). Geographers and other social scientists are working through the problem of how to actualize democratic life by examining how things/issues/problems/settings/affects compel thought and engagement, as well as how publics can be constituted through the design of participatory apparatuses (Berlant 2011; Holden et. al 2013; Marres 2013; Latour & Weibel 2005; DiSalvo 2009; Healey 2012).

We invite papers that deal with these themes or with the broad question: What does it mean to do practical—i.e. pragmatic—politics and (urban) geographical research; why have geographers traditionally resisted the injunction to be practical (whatever that means); and what impasses have presented themselves that compel us to lift the injunction now?

We are especially interested in papers on:

+ Practicality, instrumentality, and geography

+ Democracy and pragmatism

+ The production of democratic subjectivities and publics

+ Interfaces between American pragmatism and the pragmatic sociology of critique

+ Critique and ‘post-critique’

+ Thought and action

+ Pragmatic politics and post-politics

+ Issues, problems and things as ‘forcers’ of political thought and practice

+ Experimentation in urban politics

+ Experimentation as a critical research practice

+ Cities as pragmatic entities

+ Consequentialism as method

We invite interested participants to send their title and 300-word abstract to Laura Cesafsky (cesafsky@gmail.com) and Ryan Holifield (holifiel@uwm.edu) by October 15th.

References:

Agnew, J. (2011) Waterpower: Politics and the geography of water provision. Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 101(3), 463-476.

Berlant, L. G. (2011) Cruel optimism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Barnett, C. & G. Bridge (2013) Geographies of radical democracy: Agonistic pragmatism and the formation of affected interests. Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 103(4): 1022-1040.

Braun, B. (2015) From critique to experiment?: Rethinking political ecology for the Anthropocene. The Routledge Handbook of Political Ecology: 102-114.

Bridge, G. (2014) On Marxism, pragmatism and critical urban studies. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 38(5), 1644-1659.

Bulkeley, H. & V. Castán Broto (2013) Government by experiment? Global cities and the governing of climate change. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 38(3): 361-375.

Cutchin, M. (2008) John Dewey’s metaphysical ground-map and its implications for geographical inquiry. Geoforum 39(4): 1555-1569.

DiSalvo, C. (2009) Design and the construction of publics. Design Issues 25(1): 48-63.

Donaldson, A., S. Lane, N. Ward, S. & Whatmore (2013) Overflowing with issues: following the political trajectories of flooding. Environment and Planning C: Government and Policy 31(4): 603-618.

Evans, J., A. Karvonen & R. Raven (eds.) (2016) The Experimental City. New York: Routledge.

Harney, L., J. McCurry, J. Scott, & J. Wills (2016) Developing ‘process pragmatism’ to underpin engaged research in human geography. Progress in Human Geography: 40(3), 316-333.

Healey, P. (2012) Re-enchanting democracy as a mode of governance. Critical Policy Studies 6(1): 19-39.

Holden, M., A. Scerri, & C. Owens (2013) More publics, more problems: The productive interface between the pragmatic sociology of critique and Deweyan pragmatism. Contemporary Pragmatism 10(2): 1-24.

Holifield, R. & N. Schuelke (2015) The place and time of the political in urban political ecology: Contested imaginations of a river’s future. Annals of the Association of American Geographers 105(2): 294-303.

James, W. (1907/1975) Pragmatism (Vol. 1). Boston, MA: Harvard University Press.

Jones, O. (2008) Stepping from the wreckage: Geography, pragmatism, and anti-representational theory. Geoforum 39(4): 1600-1612.

Lake, R. (2016) Urban Geography Plenary Lecture: On Poetry, Pragmatism, and Urban Possibility of Creative Democracy. AAG Annual Meeting, San Francisco, CA.

Last, A. (2012) Experimental geographies. Geography Compass 6(12): 706-724.

Latour, B. (2013) An Inquiry into Modes of Existence. Boston, MA: Harvard University Press.

Latour, B. & Weibel, P. (2005) Making things public: atmospheres of democracy.

Marres, N. (2013) Why political ontology must be experimentalized: On ecoshowhomes as devices of participation. Social studies of Science 43(3): 417-443.

Sedgwick, E. K. (1997) Paranoid reading and reparative reading, or you’re so paranoid, you probably  think this essay is about you. In: Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity: 123-152.

Whatmore, S. (2013) Earthly powers and affective environments: An ontological politics of flood risk. Theory, Culture and Society 30 (7–8): 33–50.

Wood, N. & S. Smith (eds.) (2008) Themed issue: Pragmatism and geography. Geoforum 39(4): 1517-1636.

Woodyear, T. & H. Geoghagen (2013) (Re)enchanting geography? The nature of being critical and the character of critique in human geography. Progress in Human Geography 37(2): 195-214

Call For Papers
AAG 2017 Boston (April 5-8, 2017)

Session title: Geographies that Matter: The Middle East beyond the State

The prioritization of the state as a unit of study in geography is closely linked to the discipline’s colonial history. The same can also be said for the origins and motivations behind area studies and regional geography. While these histories are troublesome, we argue that modernGeography’s lack of critical, long-term engagement with the Middle East through field research is equally problematic. This CFP calls for innovative ways in which we can have engaged Middle East-focused work in Geography that goes beyond classic geopolitical tropes of state power and conflict. In a recent piece, Ince & de la Torre (2016) call for post-statist geographies, an approach that prioritizes “interrogating the intersections between statism and other power relations; constructing new epistemologies and methodologies; and shifting the way the state is represented in geographical work” (11). Building on their example, we wish to organize a (group of) session(s) that engage(s) substantively with post-statist geographies by turning our attention to engagements the Middle East.

The Middle East is an important source of theoretical insights for scholars interested in post-statist geographies. This is in part due to the still-developing state of field research by geographers there, but also, importantly, to the relative strength of localized networks within and across the region. These networks furnish numerous opportunities to investigate the evolving interactions between places inside and outside of the Middle East and the state apparatuses that try to govern them. At the same time, although state power is everywhere uneven, this uneven quality must be contextualized in time and space rather than through careless recourse to geopolitical scripts at play in formal politics – for instance, “state failure.” Due to geographers’ keenness for thinking through the politics of space, place and networks, they are well positioned to engage in the region in a way the challenges the traditional geopolitical narrative of (failed) states and conflict.

Accordingly, this Call for Papers is organizing a session that explores

• Conceptual alternativesto studying politics in state-container terms, with an emphasis on networks, topologies, STS, mobilities, etc;
• Methodological challengesthat arise in the course of fieldwork in the region, from the point of formulating research questions, priorities, and frameworks; to research design and implementation; and the processing and publishing of our data, with particular attention to how these things can transcend methodological nationalism; and
• Critical and currently-pressing political issuessuch as the Syrian conflict, environmental management, the refugee “crisis,” and global economic development in ways that highlight emergent geographies of politics in a world still dominated by territorial states.

Please send 200 word abstracts to ahamdan@ucla.edu or brittany.cook@uky.edu by October 15. We will review submissions no later thanOctober 20. We plan on having a discussant, and so papers will need to be submitted to the discussant a few weeks before April 5.

Works Cited:

Ince, Anthony, and Gerónimo Barrera de la Torre. 2016. “For Post-Statist Geographies.” Political Geography 55 (November): 10–19. doi:10.1016/j.polgeo.2016.04.001.

Call For Papers
AAG 2017 Boston (April 5-8, 2017)

Session title: Embedding Trust and Responsibility in Agrifood Networks

Organizer: Benjamin Schrager, University of Hawai‘i; schrager@hawaii.edu

The papers in this panel examine the ways in which agrifood networks are being remade to embed trust and responsibility (Lockie 2009, Thorsøe and Kjeldsen 2015). Far from being a uniform process, there are numerous strategies, and their impact continues to grow more pronounced for producers, retailers, non-profits, and consumers. Geographical approaches have examined the political economy of food certifications (Guthman 2004), the impacts of ethical consumption (Barnett et al., 2011), food’s visceral geographies (Hayes-Conroy and Martin, 2010), and the role of social anxiety (Jackson 2015). These agrifood studies are on the cusp of interdisciplinarity (Goodman 2015). This panel welcomes a wide range of approaches that bring together theoretical and empirical developments around food and agriculture.

Questions of interest include:

How does embedding trust in agrifood networks transcend and/or reinforce market dynamics?

What larger political goals can be accomplished through embedding?

How do the meanings of embedding change at different stages of the commodity chain?

How is responsibility experienced in everyday practices of food consumption?

Please submit abstracts of less than 250 words to Benjamin Schrager (schrager@hawaii.edu) by October 20th.

Works Cited:

Barnett, C., Cloke, P., Clarke, N., & Malpass, A. (2011). Globalizing Responsibility: The Political Rationalities of Ethical Consumption: Wiley-Blackwell.

Goodman, M. K. (2015). Food geographies I: Relational foodscapes and the busy-ness of being more-than-food. Progress in Human Geography, 40(2), 257-266.

Guthman, J. (2004). Agrarian dreams: the paradox of organic farming in California: University of California Press.

Hayes-Conroy, A., & Martin, D. G. (2010). Mobilising bodies: visceral identification in the Slow Food movement. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 35(2), 269-281.

Jackson, P. (2015). Anxious Appetites: Food and Consumer Culture: Bloomsbury Publishing.

Lockie, S. (2009). Responsibility and agency within alternative food networks: assembling the “citizen consumer”. Agriculture and Human Values, 26(3), 193-201.

Thorsøe, M., & Kjeldsen, C. (2015). The Constitution of Trust: function, configuration and generation of trust in alternative food networks.Sociologia Ruralis, 56(2), 157-175.

Call For Papers
AAG 2017 Boston (April 5-8, 2017)

Session title: Spaces of War Power/Police Power: Intersections, Thresholds, Modes, and Contestation

Organizers: Ben Butler, Killian McCormack and Leah Montange (University of Toronto)

This paper session aims to analyze and explore the versatility of modes of war power and police power, and the spaces and sites at the intersections and thresholds between war and police. Although the intersection between police and war power is not entirely novel, it is increasingly apparent today in the militarization of police forces and the extension of logics of war to domestic security practices, as well as in the combination of police and war tactics in peacekeeping and stability operations of militaries (Bachmann et al, 2014; Neocleous, 2014). At the same time, the boundary between inside and outside the nation-state has become troubled with the instability of traditional divisions between home and battlefield, murky divisions between war and “military operations other than war” (MOOTW), the rise of counterinsurgency (COIN), and in the militarization of police forces and militarization of borders (Anais, 2011; Bell, 2011; Coleman, 2007; Graham, 2011; Loyd, 2011; Nevins, 2002). However, while tracing diagrams of power in the interstices of these domains is important, it is crucial to identify these as sites of resistance as well. As Robin DG Kelley (2016) has observed, the war to colonize is also the war to decolonize.

We welcome papers that trace these themes in a wide variety of contexts, and that are provoked by questions such as: What are the continuities and discontinuities amongst war power, police power, and border militarization? In what ways are war power, police power and border militarization relationally constituted through resistance, struggle, and contestation? How do the intersections between police and war power challenge conventional understandings of the parameters of war and warfare?

We are especially interested in exploring these questions in relation to:

-A variety of violences, struggles, wars, and conflicts ranging from counter-terrorism operations to the war on drugs to border militarization and border control

-Transnational agreements and arrangements for foreign security assistance, border enforcement, and police training

-The circulation and exchange of technologies, material objects, and practices across military, police, and border control agencies

-War and police power in contemporary peacekeeping, stability, and counterinsurgency operations, as well as in domestic operations including counter-protest, immigration raids, and broken windows policing.

-Processes of racialization, gendering, and corporealization that occur through war power and police power

-Material sites and objects of war power and police power as nexuses of power and resistance

-Counter-hegemonic cultural production, protest, or everyday practice in relation to war and police power.

Please submit abstracts of no more than 250 words to Ben Butler (benjamin.butler@mail.utoronto.ca), Killian McCormack (k.mccormack@mail.utoronto.ca) and Leah Montange (leah.montange@mail.utoronto.ca) by October 14, 2016.

Bibliography

Anais, S. (2011) “Ethical interventions: Non-lethal weapons and the governance of insecurity.” Security Dialogue, 42(6), 537–552.

Bachmann, J., Bell, C. and Holmqvist, C. (2014) War, Police and Assemblages of Intervention. New York: Routledge.

Bell, C. (2011) Civilianizing warfare: ways of war and peace in modern counterinsurgency. Journal of International Relations and Development,14(3), 309–332.

Coleman, M. (2007) “Immigration Geopolitics Beyond the Mexico–US Border.” Antipode 39 (1), 54–76.

Graham, S. (2011). Cities under siege: the new military urbanism. New York: Verso.

Kelley, R.D.G. (2016) “Mike Brown’s Body: A Meditation on War, Race & Democracy.” Lecture on April 11, 2016 for the Hall Center for the Humanities’ 2015-2016 Humanities Lecture Series. Retrieved from: www.youtube.com/watch?v=RP8FP8qjKgc

Loyd, J. M. (2011) “Peace is Our Only Shelter”: Questioning Domesticities of Militarization and White Privilege. Antipode, 43(3), 845–873.

Neocleous, M. (2014) War power, police power. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

Nevins, J. (2002) Operation Gatekeeper : The Rise of The “illegal Alien” and the Making of the U.S.-Mexico Boundary. New York: Routledge.

Call For Papers
AAG 2017 Boston (April 5-8, 2017)

Session title: Critical geographies of policing and law enforcement

The public protests and debates about police conduct in the US highlight the salience of policing to everyday life for many people within particular places while also forcing a recognition of the relative paucity of geographic scholarship on the same. This is a missed opportunity given that the aims of policing are highly contextual (involving the daily management of people in specific places) and that the techniques of policing are highly geographic (such as limiting the movement of people, setting checkpoints, or detaining lawbreakers). Although geographers have explored some of these issues before, these efforts have not yet yielded a tradition of sustained interest in policing itself within geography. This has left geography in the unenviable position of having little to contribute to the current debates on a self-evidently geographic topic.

This session aims to lay the groundwork for more sustained geographic inquiry on policing by bringing together scholarship that addresses the many interrelated issues about law enforcement that have become so central to contemporary political life. The session welcomes contributions that are either theoretical or empirical (or both).

Possible topics include (but are not limited to) geographic perspectives on:

• Theorizing policing for geographic inquiry
• Interconnections between policing and the state
• Territorial tactics of law enforcement
• Place, policing, and race, class, gender, or other identities
• Police militarization
• Police-related violence (by police or against police)
• Spatialities of anti-police protests
• Police-community engagements
• Police privatization and neoliberal impacts on law enforcement
• Policing and urban gentrification

Please send paper titles and abstracts (250 words) or expressions of interest to Steven Radil (sradil@uidaho.edu) before October 15.

Call For Papers
AAG 2017 Boston (April 5-8, 2017)

Session title: Territorial Articulations and Shifting Legal Geographies: Indigenous and Native Rights in the Americas

Session Organizers: Sarah Kelly-Richards (University of Arizona; shkelly@email.arizona.edu) and Joel Correia (University of Colorado; joel.correia@colorado.edu)

Discussant: Dr. Tom Perreault, Syracuse University

Sponsored by: Indigenous Peoples Specialty Group, Cultural and Political Ecology (CAPE) Specialty Group, Latin American Specialty Group

Please send a 250-word abstract to Sarah Kelly-Richards (shkelly@email.arizona.edu) and Joel Correia (joel.correia@colorado.edu) by October 15th. Accepted applications will be notified by October 22^nd.

Throughout the Americas, indigenous peoples and their allies are engaging the law to defend their rights and territories. Scholars have shown that law can be used to revive, or create, new socio-spatial and economic orders that challenge historic relations between states and indigenous peoples (Postero 2007; Blaser 2010; Anthias and Radcliffe 2015). While other scholars argue that indigenous rights can paradoxically reinforce state authority and serve the purposes of expanding neoliberal spatial governance (Offen 2003; Wainwright and Bryan 2009; Bryan 2012). Nevertheless, the interpretation of law within formal legal spaces – such as courts, state institutions and multi-national nodes of the Inter-American Human Rights System – interacts with and is informed by material, discursive, and spatial articulations of rights outside of formal sites. While international treaties such as ILO Convention 169 are ratified and legally codified by many nation states in the Americas, in practice the enactment of rights varies greatly (Perreault, 2015). From the Willimapu of southern Chile to the territory of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe in the Dakotas, indigenous peoples and their allies are engaging the law through diverse strategies. In this session, we seek to discuss and better understand relationships between territory, the law, and indigenous and native rights throughout the Americas in contribution to debates in legal geography, indigenous studies, and political ecology.

Indigenous and native rights embody connections across space, time, and scale. Across the Americas, these connections are producing new legal geographies, opening political possibilities, and shifting territorial claims and practices. Both legal change and territorial processes, such as the collective learning of indigenous rights, create these openings and correspondent spaces. These legal geographies and territorial claims are connected to different histories, and processes of recuperation. Roots of current indigenous conflicts are often traced to unresolved and contested land tenure histories that reach back decades to hundreds of years. Conflicts can reflect competing spatial ontologies between legal definition and territorial embodiment, yet these definitions and practices are mutually constitutive (Benson, 2012). How conflicts regarding indigenous rights are addressed within the legal sphere and articulated in territories throughout the Americans present important, timely questions. These include:

• How are different indigenous communities and their allies engaging the law to advance indigenous rights and the material practice of those rights? More specifically, how are human and indigenous rights and natural resource laws being enacted and interpreted within diverse territories?
• Conversely, how are territorial claims being interpreted in formal legal spaces from the local to the international level? In relation to what histories of dispossession and rights recognition
• What legal technologies and mechanisms of cooptation are enrolled by state and private actors, and how are these efforts received or countered by indigenous peoples and their allies?
• How does the law limit the possibility of achieving social and environmental justice in relation to human rights violations against indigenous peoples?
• How does the law exclude or incorporate the spatial conceptions that indigenous peoples use or that are related to spirituality or cosmovision?
• In what ways are legal precedents regarding territorial claims being set within different institutional arrangements of nation states and international legal mechanisms?
• What new relationships are being forged between territory, property, and legal legitimacy?

We encourage submissions by applicants who are interested in preparing their conference papers for future publication.

Works Cited

Anthias, P. and Radcliffe, S. 2015. The ethno-environmental fix and its limits: Indigenous land titling and the production of not-quite-neoliberal natures in Bolivia. Geoforum 46: 257-269.

Benson, M. H. 2012. Mining sacred space: law’s enactment of competing ontologies in the American West. Environment and Planning A, 44, vol. 6: 1443-1458.

Blaser, M. 2010. Storytelling globalization from the Chaco and beyond. Durham: Duke University Press.

Bryan, J. 2012. Rethinking territory: Social justice and neoliberalism in Latin America’s territorial turn.Geography Compass 6, vol. 4: 215-226.

Offen, K. 2003. The territorial turn: Making black territories in Pacific Colombia. Journal of Latin American Geography 2, vol. 1: 43-73.

Perreault, T. 2015. Performing participation: Mining, power, and the limits of public consultation in Bolivia. The Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology, 20, vol. 3, 433-451.

Postero, N. 2007. Now we are citizens: Indigenous politics in Postmulticultural Bolivia. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Wainwright, J. and Bryan, J. 2009. Cartography, territory, property: Postcolonial reflections on indigenous counter-mapping in Nicaragua and Belize. Cultural Geographies 16, vol. 2: 153-178.

Call For Papers
AAG 2017 Boston (April 5-8, 2017)

Session title: Neo-Extractivism, Resource Nationalism, and ‘New’ Geographies of Resource Governance and Development

Co-Organizers: Meredith DeBoom (University of Colorado-Boulder) and Emily Billo (Goucher College)

Sponsored by: Cultural and Political Ecology, Development Geographies, and Political Geography Specialty Groups

Deadline for Papers/Panel Proposals: October 13, 2017

Despite the political and economic challenges associated with commodity dependency, governments of many resource-rich states have placed a renewed emphasis on resource-based development over the past ten years. In countries such as Bolivia, South Africa, Ecuador, Namibia, Zambia, and Argentina, opposition and ruling political leaders have called for or implemented diverse reconfigurations of resource governance, resulting in new forms of “networked interactions of various state and non-state organizations and institutions operating at multiple sites and scales” (Himley, 2008: 435). These changes have often been accompanied by renewed rhetoric of national progress and resource nationalism, and also by political unrest rooted in environmental degradation, inequality, and violated property rights. This unrest has highlighted the injustices and violence often associated with state-led development and resource governance practices, including increased criminalization of environmental protests. Such developments at the “resource-state nexus” (Bridge, 2014) are of particular interest to geographers given the territorial fixity of resource deposits and the interconnections among land, resources, place-making, livelihoods, subject formation, and the state.

To date, however, research on the (re)turn to resource-based development has been hindered by regional and subfield-based research silos. These sessions aim to challenge this fragmentation by bringing Latin America-based studies of neo-extractivism (Gudynas, 2012; Burchardt and Dietz, 2014), resource-based struggles (Bebbington and Bury, 2013), and resource imaginaries (Coronil, 1997; Perreault and Valdivia, 2010) into conversation with research on petro-developmentalism (Ovadia, 2016), resource nationalism (Childs, 2015), and resource sovereignty in Africa (Emel et al., 2011), as well as research on resource governance in other regions.

Through a paper session and panel discussion, we aim to connect scholarship on resource governance across a variety of regions and subfields, including political ecology, political geography, economic geography, development geography, legal geographies, and resource geographies. Our goal is to better understand the commonalities and divergences across shifting resource governance regimes and their implications for development and social and environmental justice at multiple scales.

1) Paper session: we invite papers that engage with resource governance in and across a variety of contexts. Both empirical and theoretical proposals are welcome. Possible topics might include, but are not limited to:

• Continuities and divergences in resource governance under neoliberal and post-neoliberal/post-Washington Consensus extraction regimes
• Implications of new resource governance schemes for development challenges associated with commodity dependency (e.g., the resource curse)
• State-society relations and resource-based development
• Resource imaginaries, nationalism, place-making, and state-making
• Roles of foreign investment in domestic resource politics
• Resource extraction and the developmental or neo-developmental state
• Neo-extractivism and indigenous politics
• Scale in resource politics and associated scalar tensions
• Issues of enclosure, dispossession, property rights, and exclusion
• Criminalization of environmental protests
• Identity, subject formation, and social movements
• Sovereignty, territory, states, and extractive industries
• Methodological or fieldwork issues associated with researching resource governance

2) Roundtable/panel discussion: we invite expressions of interest by panelists who might speak to broader theoretical debates or to the practicalities of conducting research on resource governance.

Submissions:

Presenters interested in participating in the paper session are asked to submit a paper title and an abstract of no more than 250 words to the organizers by October 13, 2017.

Presenters interested in participating in the panel discussion are asked to submit a brief description of 100-200 words overviewing the topics and themes about which they would like to speak by October 13, 2017.

Please direct submissions and questions to Emily Billo (emily.billo@goucher.edu) and Meredith DeBoom (meredith.deboom@colorado.edu).

Relevant Literature

Bebbington, A. and J. Bury (Eds.). 2013. Subterranean Struggles: New Dynamics of Mining, Oil, and Gas in Latin America. Austin: University of Texas Press. 

Bridge, G. 2014. Resource Geographies II: The Resource-State Nexus. Progress in Human Geography 38(1), 118-130.

Burchardt, H-J. and K. Dietz. 2014. (Neo-)extractivism: A New Challenge for Development Theory from Latin America. Third World Quarterly 35(3): 468-486.

Childs, J. 2016. Geography and Resource Nationalism: A Critical Review and Reframing. The Extractive Industries and Society 3: 539-546.

Childs, J. and J. Hearn. 2016. ‘New’ Nations: Resource-Based Development Imaginaries in Ghana and Ecuador. Third World Quarterly. DOI: 10.1080/01436597.2016.1176859.

Coronil, F. 1997. The Magical State: Nature, Money, and Modernity in Venezuela. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Emel, J., M. Huber, and M. Makene. 2011. Extracting Sovereignty: Capital, Territory, and Gold Mining in Tanzania. Political Geography 35: 35-51.

Gudynas, E. 2012. Estado Compensador y Nuevos Extractivismos: Las Ambivalencias del Progresismo Sudamericano. Nueva Sociedad 237: 128-146.

Himley, M. 2008. Geographies of Environmental Governance: The Nexus of Nature and Neoliberalism. Geography Compass 2: 433-451.

Ovadia, J.S. 2016. The Petro-Developmental State in Africa: Making Oil Work in Angola, Nigeria and the Gulf of Guinea.

Perreault, T. and G. Valdivia. 2010. Hydrocarbons, Popular Protest and National Imaginaries: Ecuador and Bolivia in Comparative Context. Geoforum 41(5): 689-699.

Rosales, A. 2013. Going Underground: The Political Economy of the ‘Left Turn’ in South America. Third World Quarterly 38(8): 1443-1457.

Veltmeyer, H. and J. Petras (Eds.) 2014. The New Extractivism: A Post-Neoliberal Development Model or Imperialism of the Twenty-First Century? Zed Books.

Call For Papers
AAG 2017 Boston (April 5-8, 2017)

Session title: Practicing Citizenship:  What Roles for Conformity?  Dissent?  Protest?

Citizenship is often promoted as a way of consolidating a public or a polity that might otherwise seem divided or fractured.  In this way, citizenship is imagined as more than a public or legal standing, but is promoted as a practice and way of being together that can provide a salve for a society’s wounds.  This is evident in a range of contemporary settings, from the citizenship education programs in many western school curricula to international efforts to foster citizenship in post-conflict settings.

Used in this way, citizenship can seem to imply conformance with a set of rules and expectations about how an individual should be in public, encompassing their comportment, the ideas and arguments that are acceptable, and ways of relating to each other.  Critics have argued that encouraging citizenship as a salve for conflict and division, however, is a way of challenging dissent, depoliticizing it, and of delegitimizing dissent and protest.  In this way, citizenship is enrolled in post-political consensus.  Yet around the world, we see expressions of dissent and protest, often invoking agents’ rights as citizens or attempting to expand the boundaries of citizenship and the possibilities for dissent and challenges to political structures and institutions.  These examples often highlight the hegemony of particular assumptions about and practices of citizenship; in so doing, they enable nuanced understandings of the relationships between apparent conformity, dissent, and citizenship.

We invite paper submissions that address the practice of citizenship, the acceptability and legitimacy of behaviors, and the political challenges that citizenship – as an idea, a practice, and a set of values – enables and constrains.  Topics might include, but are not limited to:

*  The values that implicitly underpin citizenship discourses and practices

* Protest and dissent in authoritarian or ‘non-democratic’ states

* The relationships between a politics and ethic of care, citizenship and dissent

* The conditions under which the right to dissent and protest are legitimately challenged

* The ways in which dissent and protest are managed in conflictual or divided societies

* The possibility that apparent conformity may be used to challenge political assumptions and practices

* The relationships between citizenship, belonging and democracy

If interested in participating in these sessions, please send abstracts of 250 words to Lynn Staeheli (lynn.staeheli@durham.ac.uk) or Sandy Marshall (djmarshall@email.arizona.edu) by 10 October 2016.

Call For Papers
AAG 2017 Boston (April 5-8, 2017)

Session title: Reparations, Restitution, Reconciliation?

AAG, Boston, April 5-9, 2017

Ta-Nehisi Coates’s article, “The Case for Reparations” (The Atlantic, June 2014), has reignited demands for restitution for the “multi-century plunder of black people in America,” who have faced economic dispossession not only because of the ongoing legacy of slavery but other legal and extra-legal racist practices such as redlining, block-busting, incarceration, employment insurance, and GI Bill benefits. Since then, Black Lives Matter has also taken up “reparations for past and continuing harms” as one of its core demands, to remedy the poverty gap that they identify as arising from colonialism, slavery, redlining, mass incarceration and surveillance.

The demands for reparations by groups who have been marginalized, oppressed and subject to social, political and economic violence, stands in stark contrast with how money has been disbursed by governments and/or corporations as part of reconciliation proceedings or legal actions. Too often, money is used as a tool to silence dissent, and to sidestep accountability. For example, as part of Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, monies have been allocated to all survivors of Indian Residential Schools, with additional monies for those who suffered the most egregious forms of abuse. But only a paltry $2 million has been allocated for the 31,000 claims already decided. With respect to the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in 2010, BP set up a $20 billion trust to make reparations. But payments were so slow, that federal, state and local claimants had to turn to a class action suit to access funds. In neither of these cases has reparations led to the kind of transformative change envisioned by Coates.

This session will explore both the potential and pitfalls of putting a price on dispossession, violence and harm. In particular, papers are encouraged that consider the forms of social justice that are made possible or problematic by different forms of monetary compensation. This might include critiques of compensation practices that have already been enacted, or reflections on future opportunities. Examples from sites around the world are encouraged. Among the questions to be addressed are: What are the political stakes of reparations? What does it mean to put a price on social and political violence? How do monetary payments sit alongside other forms of redress? What kinds of violence are made visible, and what kinds are rendered invisible? What kinds of processes would be required to enact more equitable forms of redistribution? How can reparations be imagined anew? Papers are welcomed on any forms of reparation or compensation, including, but not limited to, colonialism, slavery, environmental damage, war, and terrorism.

Registration for the AAG and the submission of abstracts (of no more than 250 words) will be required by October 20, 2016. But, to better plan for the session, I encourage expressions of interest as soon as possible, and by October 15^th at the latest, at Emily.gilbert@utoronto.ca