Call for Papers: Association of American Geographers (AAG) Annual Meeting, March 29-April 2, 2016, San Francisco, CA

Point, Line, Plane, Volume: Increasing Dimensionality in Geographic Inquiry

Session Organizers: Katherine Sammler (University of Arizona), Audra El Vilaly (University of Arizona)

Sponsor: Political Geography Specialty Group

Improvements in technology along with expanding territories of capital investment make it important to recognize that previous theorizations in geography have largely considered space and territory in two dimensions. Recent scholarship calls for the extension of theoretical and empirical inquiry to include the third spatial dimension of verticality and volumes. Contributions to these efforts include research on oceans (Steinberg and Peters 2015), subterranean spaces (Braun 2000; Weizman 2002; Elden 2013a, 2013b), airspace (Williams 2013), and outer space (MacDonald 2007). These volumes have been considered, respectively, as spaces of fluidity and continual reformation, as the hidden, invisible or imperceptible, as spaces of military power and surveillance, and as the final capitalist frontier. This session seeks to expound on conversations of the material, political, legal and social assemblages that construct these voluminous spaces as three-dimensional terrains of historical, contemporary, and future human activities. This includes how bodies are moved, replaced or stretched – spatially, temporally and technologically – towards different sites, territories, and regimes of governance.

Expanding the conceptualization of territory from areas to volumes and from surfaces to cubes, spheres and columns of height and depth produces a need to rethink the politics of space, in particular the techniques for asserting power over and within volumetric spaces. Thus securing the material and affective dimensions of verticality necessarily forces a reorientation and renegotiation of power relations, property rights regimes, legal apparatuses, financial calculations of transmuting volume into value, cartographic representations, and other technologies of governance (Bridge 2013; Elden 2013a). In this session, we expand the concepts of verticality and volumetric territory beyond the realm of exceptional, securitized, and militarized spaces, previously the predominant focus of this scholarship. We are particularly interested in the applications of and implications for rethinking space and place as vertical and voluminous through the occupation, regulation, and exploitation of bodies, objects, and territories such as via GPS tracking, satellite surveillance, on and off-shore resource extraction, on and off-planet mining, regulation of atmosphere, and privatization of space travel. We welcome conceptual, theoretical, and empirically based papers.

If you are interested in presenting a paper in this session, please submit a title and abstract (up to 250 words) to Katherine Sammler (ksammler@email.arizona.edu) and Audra El Vilaly (audra@email.arizona.edu) by Monday, November 16, 2015.

References:

Adey, P. 2013. Securing the volume/volume: Comments on Stuart Elden’s Plenary paper ‘Secure the volume’. Political Geography 34: 52-54.
Braun, B. 2000. Producing vertical territory: Geology and governmentality in late Victorian Canada. Ecumene 7(1): 7-46.
Bridge, G. 2013. Territory, now in 3D! Political Geography 34: 55-57.
Deleuze, G. and F. Guattari. 1987. A thousand plateaus: Capitalism and schizophrenia. University of Minnesota Press: Minneapolis.
Elden, S. 2013a. Secure the volume: Vertical geopolitics and the depth of power. Political Geography 34: 35-51.
Elden, S. 2013b. Bodies, books, beneath: A reply to Adey and Bridge. Political Geography 34: 58-59.
MacDonald, F. 2007. Anti-Astropolitik– outer space and the orbit of geography. Progress in Human Geography 31(5): 592-615.
Scott, H.V. 2008. Colonialism, landscape and the subterranean. Geography Compass 2 (6): 1853-1869.
Steinberg, P. and K. Peters. 2015. Wet ontologies, fluid spaces: Giving depth to volume through oceanic thinking. Environment and Planning D: Society  

and Space 33: 247-264.
Weizman, E. 2002. Introduction to the politics of verticality. https://www.opendemocracy.net/ecology-politicsverticality/article_801.jsp
Williams, A.J. 2013. Re-orientating vertical geopolitics. Geopolitics 18: 225-246.

CfP: Dimensions of Political Ecology 2016

Illicit Agricultures and Natures

Session title: “Geo-economics: geographer’s innovation in economics“

Session Convenors: Balázs Forman (Department of Economic Geography and Future Studies, Corvinus University of Budapest)

Description:

In many regions of the World, very serious socio-territorial changes are currently happening in non-core areas. As in other parts of the world, most development in Latin America, in Central Europe, or in East Asia is. recently peripheral and differs from ‘classical’ economic development in North Atlantic countries.
One characteristic of recent economic development is the high dependency and/or interdependence on core countries and on world market.
Other characteristic of recent economic development is the high dependency and/or interdependence on natural and environmental resources and climate change.
How we can focuse our attention for changes are caused by climate change if interests of the all countries are high level fragmented? If the economic growth and economic development needs for some countries to solve the different challenges of ageing population, to sustain systems of the education, the public services, the pension, the public health with changing population and growing inequalities.
The key terms are the ineqaulity, sustainability and welfare allocation and/or distribution between different individuals, social groups, regions, countries and generations. We examine, how can adapt the  European Union’s solutions in some area in frame of the World. For example, EU 15 burden sharing on CO2 emissions in use of Kyoto Protocol.
The peripherial and semi-peripherial countries in the vicinity of economic growth hubs are changing rapidly. However, peripheries of world economy are not only affected by the geographical expansion of their role in spatial division of labour leading to dispersed forms of economic development in the core-periphery connection.
In a general sense, it seems that semi-peripherial countries are becoming a more central arena under neoliberal capitalism in World economy, leading to spatial reconfigurations as well as social, ecological and economic disruptions. We have to face dichotomy of stability- instability and short and long term periods.
However, up to now, much existing work has focused on economic development of North America and Europe, while systematized reflections on developments in Latin America, in Central Europe and etc. have been underrepresented.
Moreover, the developments in between the developed and undeveloped worlds may require a re-thinking of existing approaches to understand the role of the spatial in one hand in current modes of capital accumulation and in other hand in effect of climate vhange.
For instance, there has been interaction between economic geography, development geography and geography and economics of different world regions  and those studying the political economy, while both could benefit from each other.
This book to discuss the natures, causes, consequences, and politics of the dynamics taking place in peripheries and semi-peripheries of World economy, in order to enhance our understanding of the role of these spaces for current processes of neoliberal development.

We search for answer the following questions:
•      What are the characteristics of current changes in the peripherial and semi-peripherial countries or regions, and (how) do they differ from processes of economic growth and development of core countries?
•      How do these changes relate to current modes of capital accumulation, such as the increasing importance of effects of climate change?
•      What makes these spaces special and attractive for new forms of commodification?
•      What are the social, ecological and economic effects of the new spatial division of labour and/or configurations?
•      How does development in the periphery interrelate with technical change?
•      How is it linked to the commodification of nature and a re-distribution of access to natural resources and their benefits?
•      Are peripherial spaces also new arenas of resistance to globalization?

Please send your abstract of not more than 250 words to the session convenors, balazs.forman@uni-corvinus.hu by November 2nd, 2015.

Williams, A.J. 2013. Re-orientating vertical geopolitics. Geopolitics 18: 225-246.

We are looking for a couple more people to finalize the discussion panel, but if there is sufficient interest, then we will expand to two sessions.
Please send in a short description of what you’d like to focus on or talk about, with your name, affiliation, and contact info to both the organizers by November 10, 2015: Dr. Farhana Sultana (sultanaf@syr.edu) and Marien González-Hidalgo (marien.gonzalezhidalgo@gmail.com).
Thanks!

2016 AAG Conference CFP

Title: Emotional Political Ecologies

Session Organisers:
Farhana Sultana (Associate Professor of Geography, Syracuse University)
Marien González-Hidalgo (Entitle PhD Fellow, University of Chile)

Abstract:
Emotions imbue environmental governance, resource use, and nature-society conflicts, but the relationship between emotions, power, and environmental change has only recently been systematically studied. Emotional political ecology is emerging as a field of study in geography and beyond, and this approach elucidates how emotions matter in nature–society relations, moving beyond rational resource users or managers to flesh out fuller and feeling subjects that complicate and enrich current understandings of nature-society relationships (Sultana 2015). Recent scholarship has brought together various strands of political ecology, emotional and affective geographies, feminist geography, and other theories into rich conversation that contribute to this emerging field (e.g. Sultana 2011; Nightingale 2011; Singh 2013; Morale and Harris 2014). This discussion panel aims to advance the study of emotions and affect within political ecology by fostering a debate about theoretical frameworks and action research agendas that can contribute to understanding everyday corporal and emotional experiences taking place in the course of environmental governance and/or conflict. We aim to elaborate and expand the role of emotions in the triad power-knowledge-subjectivities, and advance how the consideration of emotions can support both the action and research of environmental change.
Some questions we will consider, but are not limited to, are the following:
* What does the study of emotions add in helping us understand environmental change and conflicts?
* What is the role of emotions and “the affective” in relationships between power, knowledge and subjectivities?
* How do affective and emotional processes facilitate governmentality and subject-making, commoning, and resistance?
* How can we develop research in political ecology (particularly feminist and post-colonial/anti-colonial political ecology) that integrates further the embodied, emotional, and spiritual aspects of the production of socionatures?

References cited:
Morales, M., & Harris, L. 2014. “Using Subjectivity and Emotions to Reconsider Participatory Resource Management” World Development, 64: 703-712.
Nightingale, A. 2011. “Beyond Design Principles: Subjectivity, Emotion, and the (Ir)Rational Commons” Society and Natural Resources, 24, 119-132.
Singh, N. M., 2013. “The affective labor of growing forests and the becoming of environmental subjects: Rethinking environmentality in Odisha, India” Geoforum, 47: 189–198.
Sultana, F., 2011. “Suffering for water, suffering from water: Emotional geographies of resource access, control and conflict” Geoforum, 42(2), 163–172.
Sultana, F., 2015, “Emotional Political Ecology” In The International Handbook of Political Ecology, Raymond Bryant (Ed.), Edward Elgar Publishing, UK. Pp. 633-645.

This session explores the prospect of radical social transformation by critically examining the praxis of science, activism, and policy through a postclassical lens. Four confirmed papers explore moving from quantum social theory to social practice; employing narrative analysis as a framework for understanding ontological security at the Arctic ice edge; identifying NJ boundary organizations focusing on climate change and feminist science studies; and rethinking agency through a propositional infraglobalization approach. We encourage papers that explicitly relate critical ontology approaches with agency and empirical studies.

From ontological shifts to action on the ground:

Enacting agency for transformation through post-classical praxis

This paper session explores emergent ways of thinking about social transformation in the face of apparently overwhelming and complex challenges in natural-human systems. Papers take up approaches that pay heed to the relationship between ontology and materiality. These approaches draw from post-classical worldviews that increasingly influence the social sciences in implicit and explicit ways, and highlight the importance of narrative, metaphor and subjective meaning in approaching risk and vulnerability, and enacting social transformation. While the ‘ontological turn’ has resulted in a rethinking of key classical concepts, especially binaries, this session is concerned with how ontological shifts affect and shape action on the ground and positive political outcomes.

A number of prospects for radical social change are examined, with agency understood through a post-classical social scientific lens, from approaches to climate change action to Arctic biodiversity to globalization alternatives. In so doing, the limits of classical approaches and the discounting of consciousness, intentionality and subjectivity are considered relative to the urgent need for complex transformations in shaping material realities. The papers explore how new approaches might succeed where classical approaches with modernist ontological commitments were lacking. The session papers are concerned with theorizations of both agency and ontology and how these might inform radical reconfigurations of ways of seeing, being and doing to meet the complex and uncertain challenges ahead.

Some questions to stimulate discussion and debate:

• How does ontological innovation translate into material and behavioral change?
• What are the prospects for post-classical paradigms and ways of knowing and how can they effectively translate into ways of doing in natural and human systems?
• How does the entanglement of individual and collective action change when we question the classical underpinnings of social science?
• What is the role of intersubjectivity, intentionality and subjective phenomena in enacting deliberate and deliberative social change?
• What does a probabilistic rather than deterministic social science imply for the outcomes of scenarios for collaborations and negotiations?
• How can alternative approaches do praxis differently in ways that are attentive to questions of justice, empowerment, power and violence?

Discussant: TBA depending on final cumber of presenters.

Submission Guidelines: Please submit abstracts of 250 words or less along with your presenter PIN and affiliation by October 29, 2015 toann.elkhoury@mq.edu.au. Participants will be confirmed and their abstracts added to the session on October 29.

CORRUPT PLACES: THE ILLICIT IN THE GOVERNANCE AND DEVELOPMENT OF
CITIES, REGIONS AND NETWORKS
Edited by Francesco Chiodelli (Gran Sasso Science Institute, Italy),
Tim Hall (University of Winchester, UK) and Ray Hudson (University of
Durham, UK)
[proposal to Routledge]

Call for chapter proposals for a volume which offers an innovative
multidisciplinary collection exploring the roles of illicit actors of
various kinds in processes of urban and regional governance and
development, and the effects of illicit networks on the spaces and
places in which they are grounded and to which they are connected.

*Deadline for chapter proposals: 30th November 2015

**Book outline, instructions for prospective authors, and timeline at:
www.gssi.infn.it/images/dottorati/scienze-sociali/Corrupt_Places_Book_Proposal_DEF.pdf

• What practices of governance control Arctic space and place?

• How are practices conceived across time and space?

• By whom or what are such practices conceived?

• What values are at stake in the development of Arctic space and place?

• How are subjectivities expressed and politicised in practices of governance?

• What ‘other’ identities are apparent in practices of governance?

• Has there always been an ‘Arctic’ space and place?

Call for Papers: AAG Annual Meeting, San Francisco, March 29 – April 2, 2016

Session title: “Geo-economics: geographer’s innovation in economics. Beyond the neoliberal economics“

Session Convenors: Balázs Forman (Department of Economic Geography and Future Studies, Corvinus University of Budapest)

In many regions of the World, very serious socio-territorial changes are currently happening in non-core areas. As in other parts of the world, most development in Latin America, in Central Europe, or in East Asia is. recently peripheral and differs from ‘classical’ economic development in North Atlantic countries.

One characteristic of recent economic development is the high dependency and/or interdependence on core countries and on world market.

As a result, previously peripherial and semi-peripherial countries in the vicinity of economic growth hubs are changing rapidly.

However, peripheries of world economy are not only affected by the geographical expansion of their role in spatial division of labour leading to dispersed forms of economic development in the core-periphery connection.

In a general sense, it seems that semi-peripherial countries are becoming a more central arena under neoliberal capitalism in World economy, leading to spatial reconfigurations as well as social, ecological and economic disruptions. But, the perpherial countries and/or regions are losing their ground in World economy.

However, up to now, much existing work has focused on economic development of North America and Europe, while systematized reflections on developments in Latin America, in Central Europe and etc. have been underrepresented.

Moreover, the developments in between the developed and undeveloped worlds may require a re-thinking of existing approaches to understand the role of the spatial in current modes of capital accumulation.

For instance, there has been interaction between economic geography, development geography and geography and economics of different world regions and those studying the political economy, while both could benefit from each other.

This panel brings together scholars to discuss the natures, causes, consequences, and politics of the dynamics taking place in peripheries and semi-peripheries of World economy, in order to enhance our understanding of the role of these spaces for current processes of neoliberal development.

We invite proposals for papers addressing (but not limited to) one or more of the following questions:

• What are the characteristics of current changes in the peripherial and semi-peripherial countries or regions, and (how) do they differ from processes of economic growth and development of core countries?
• How do these changes relate to current modes of capital accumulation, such as the increasing power of finance capital?
• What makes these spaces special and attractive for new forms of commodification?
• What are the social, ecological and economic effects of the new spatial division of labour and/or configurations?
• How does development in the periphery interrelate with technical change?
• How is it linked to the commodification of nature and a re-distribution of access to natural resources and their benefits?
• Are peripherial spaces also new arenas of resistance to neoliberal globalization?

The session is linked to an edited book we are planning to submit with a well-established international academic publisher that has shown keen interest in the project.

Please send your abstract of not more than 250 words to the session convenors, balazs.forman@uni-corvinus.hu by November 2nd, 2015.