Call for Papers: AAG Annual Meeting, San Francisco, CA, 29 March – 2 April 2016 – Deadline extended to 26 October 2015

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Session Title: The post-post-Soviet space? Interrogating the region in the quarter century since communism’s end

Organizers: Ted Holland, Havighurst Postdoctoral Fellow, Miami University of Ohio, hollance@miamioh.edu <mailto:<mailto:and Matthew Derrick, Assistant Professor of Geography, Humboldt State University, Matthew.Derrick@humboldt.edu.

Submissions: Please send expressions of interest in the panel session and abstracts for the paper session to Ted Holland (hollanec@miamioh.edu<mailto:) by 26 October 2015.

Mitchneck, B. 2005. Geography Matters: Discerning the Importance of Local Context. Slavic Review 64 (3): 491-516.

Panel Title: Tourism, Militarization and Nation-Building

The papers in this panel examine the intersection of tourism, militarization and nation-building in diverse geopolitical contexts. Specifically, papers explore the various ways in which narratives of tourism sites are frequently mediated by competing discourses perpetuated by the tourism industry, the military-industrial complex and the state. As such, papers in this panel will challenge what Teaiwa (1999) has referred to as “militourism” or “a phenomenon by which military or paramilitary force ensures the smooth running of a tourist industry, and that same tourist industry masks the military force behind it.”  Thus, papers in this panel will address Teaiwa’s observation that while the military and tourism industries provide opportunities of employment and social mobility, the impacts on land through environmental as well as sociocultural components of “host” communities have been decidedly contested (Teaiwa 1999). In a similar vein, Gonzalez (2013) pays attention to the mutual work of militarism and tourism in examining the “possibilities of American historical and contemporary dominance” in Asia and the Pacific region, indicating its wide implications of better understanding of tourism and military geography. Teaiwa and Gonzalez’s work, among others, paved the way for future examinations of the convergences of militarism and tourism. For example, emerging work in this field addresses processes in which militarization and tourism influence economic and cultural landscapes through nation-building projects as well as resistance to the development vis-a-vis social movement.  Ultimately, this panel aims to contribute to new understandings of how discourses and practices of tourism and militarism articulate with narratives of security, place and the state.

We welcome papers that engage with the topics related but not limited to occupation, memories of war, battlefield tours, gender/military/tourism, postcolonialism, demilitarization tours, activism and tourism, and social movement participation.

Please send your abstract of 200 words or less to Sayaka Sakuma at ss26@hawaii.edu and Kyle Kajihiro at kkajihir@hawaii.edu by October 25, 2015.

Sayaka Sakuma | Kyle Kajihiro

Unviersity of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa

ss26@hawaii.edu | kkajihir@hawaii.edu

Call For Papers: American Association of Geographers (AAG), Annual Meeting, San Francisco, CA. March 29th – April 2nd, 2016

New Geographies of Alienation: Getting Reacquainted with Estrangement

Organizers:
Alex Colucci, Kent State University
Stian Rice, Kent State University

Marx’s concept of alienation, first put forward in his 1844 Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts, links the structural organization of the modern labor process with its devastating effect on human beings, “on their physical and mental states and on the social processes of which they are a part” (Ollman 1976, 131). As a process of disconnecting and distancing humans from nature and from each other, it is somewhat surprising that alienation has received infrequent attention from geographers (see Evans, 1978; Peet 1978; Mitchell 2003; Olwig 2005). This session explores (1) whether alienation – in either new or classical interpretations – can be useful for emerging trends in geographic thought, and (2) how these trends might extend, expand, or contradict Marx’s original argument.

Marx identified four forms of alienation in the modern labor process. First, workers are alienated from the product of their labor. Second, workers are alienated from the act of production. Under capitalism, a worker must labor in order to survive, making the laboring act one of ‘deadening compulsion’ rather than free choice. Third, workers are alienated from species-being (Gattungswesen). Reduced by capital into exchangeable and expendable parts for the machinery of production, the labor process denies workers their essential ‘humanness.’ Finally, as a consequence of the first three, workers are alienated from other humans through the collective separation of humanity from its species-being, and the demands of a labor market that pits each person in direct competition for survival.

This session seeks geographic work related to the processes of disconnection, distancing, and estrangement complicit in alienation. Prospective abstracts need not focus solely on labor processes alone. Indeed, we encourage new or unconventional approaches and subjects, either theoretical or case-based. Possible areas of interest include (but certainly are not limited to):

• Political geography, political ecology, radical geography, and cultural geography.
• Critical race theory
• Post- and non-human geography
• Socio-nature studies
• Landscape studies
• Material geographies
• Actor-networks
• Migration and detainment studies
• Literary geography

Interested participants should send their abstract (250 words max) to either Alex Colucci (acolucc3@kent.edu) or Stian Rice (srice14@kent.edu) by Oct 25, 2015.

References:

Evans, David M. 1978. “Alienation, Mental Illness and the Partioning of Space.” Antipode 10 (1): 13–23.

Mitchell, Don. 2003. “Cultural Landscapes: Just Landscapes or Landscapes of Justice?” Progress in Human Geography 27 (6): 787–96.

Marx, Karl. 2013. “Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844.” Start Publishing LLC.

Ollman, Bertell. 1976. Alienation: Marx’s Conception of Man in a Capitalist Society. Cambridge University Press.

Olwig, Kenneth R. 2005. “Representation and Alienation in the Political Land-Scape.” Cultural Geographies 12 (1): 19–40.

Peet, Richard. 1978. “The Geography of Human Liberation.” Antipode 10-11 (3-1): 119–134.

Deadline extension CFP AAG 2016: Transnationalizing Migration Management?   

AAG annual meeting, San Francisco, March 29 – April 2, 2016

Organizers

Malene H. Jacobsen and Leif Johnson (University of Kentucky)

Session Overview

Although international migration by its very nature involves flows across territorial borders, the geographical imagination of migration management remains thoroughly embedded within the nation-state. Building on the recent work of Mountz & Loyd (2014) and Collyer & King (2015), this session asks the question of what it means to theorize migration management through a transnational lens. This session is aimed broadly at scholars interested in spaces of bordering and migration management practices in the context of cross border governance. We invite submissions that explore the spatial aspects of migration management across different scales.

The session seeks to engage in the following questions but is also open to others: How do national/transnational understandings of migration management differ and/or converge? How is the concept of transnationalism related to other concepts in migration studies like the international, (im)mobility, flows, networks, globalization, extraterritoriality, offshoring, assemblage, etc.? To what extent is the transnationalization of migration management a historically novel trend/phenomenon? How is the phenomenon related to changes within the nation-state itself or other forces (market pressures, neoliberalization, etc.)? How can transnational migration management practices/strategies be studied empirically and unpacked conceptually? What kinds of political possibilities does the transnationalization of migration management enable or foreclose?

Possible empirical topics might include:

–          The spatiality of borders and migration management

–          Geographies of the institutions and agencies engaged in transnational migration management

–          The roles of international agencies and humanitarian organizations in controlling/facilitating mobility

–          Cross-border policing and policies

–          Bi- and multilateral agreements between countries

–          Socioeconomic development in border regions

–          The role of development aid in migration management

–          Migration management as an area of expertise, intervention, and specialist domain of knowledge, logics, personnel, methods, and politics

–          The humanitarian-migration management nexus

–          Managerial practices such as refugee resettlement, deterrence, confinement, deportation, and ‘voluntary’ return

Please send abstracts of up to 250 words to Malene H. Jacobsen (malene.jacobsen@uky.edu) and Leif Johnson (leif.johnson@uky.edu) by Thursday, October 22^nd, 2015. Selected abstracts will be accepted by October 24^th. All participants must provide AAG PINs by October 28^th.

Call for session paper AAG 2016 San Francisco (March 29 – April 2)
Promoting soft mobilities : towards more inclusive cities ?
Organizers: France Guérin-Pace (Ined, CIST, Paris) and Paulina Lopez-Gutierrez (University Paris 1, Ined)

Keywords: soft mobilities, urban policies, actorness, inclusive cities, urban inequalities, representations.
The promotion of walking, and of soft mobilities more widely, in contemporary urban public policies is a key objective for developing more sustainable cities.
These policies aim mainly at reducing environmental pollution as part of the effort to limit climate change, but they also have an explicit discourse on access to fairer or more inclusive cities.
What is the reality behind these policies which are taking shape in various urban, socioeconomic, and cultural contexts?
Based on concrete examples, how do these policies participate in the construction of fairer cities or, on the contrary, contribute to the strengthening of inequalities?

These are the questions we shall seek to address in this session by inviting participants to explore this theme from several different angles:

– The discourse of urban policy actors.

Analyzing the broad array of actors involved in the implementation of public policies reveals very different representations of the public place, and multiple issues of power.
We will examine who are the actors involved in implementing urban policies in favor of soft mobilities, how they express themselves in official discourse, and what arguments they employ to promote such mobilities.

– How individual practices are inscribed in space?

Analyzing how these soft mobilities take practical form in the daily practices of the urban space raises questions about the extent to which the actors’ discourse reflects inhabitants real needs.
The way in which soft mobilities are integrated into the fabric of the city can reveal inequalities of access that may strengthen rather that alleviate existing inequalities in terms of transport.
We will also take an interest in the strategies that may be used by individuals to circumvent and overcome various difficulties and constraints (lack of facilities and difficulty
in accessing goods and services, inadequate transport provision, regulations governing usage, etc.).

– The exclusive dimension of soft mobility policies

Despite the objective of making cities more inclusive, we observe that in certain urban contexts the implementation of soft mobility policies involves a form of privatization of public place and results in enhancement
of certain places to the detriment of others, an outcome that runs contrary to the goal of social opening that underpins those policies. The development of urban facilities (pedestrian streets, cycle lanes, etc.)
sometimes competes with previous uses of the urban space that are now considered incompatible. We thus observe that the legitimacy of users is sometimes undermined, on the basis of varied characteristics,
such as gender, age or socioeconomic status, or specific forms of usage such as informal businesses and settlements.

Please send inquiries and abstracts (250 words) before October 28^th to France Guérin-Pace (guerin@ined.fr) and Paulina Lopez-Gutierrez. (pau.lop.gu@gmail.com) with your PIN number.

More information about the AAG conference: http://www.aag.org/annualmeeting

Call for Papers: AAG 2016 San Francisco, CA

Title: The European Migration Crisis
Photographs, interviews and news reports covering the rising number of international migrants who are arriving along the European Union’s border or have died trying to reach Europe are now ubiquitous. This recent and unprecedented increase in the number of migrants destined for Europe is so startling it has been identified as a migration “crisis”. While internally the European Union’s Schengen common border agreement purports freedom of movement for its citizens, international migrants arriving at the border face numerous challenges and the European Union has increased spending for its border patrol operations since April 2015. Discrepancies between various member-states responses’ to migrants and their willingness to accept asylum applications complicate matters further.
The aim of this session is to critically examine this migration from a theoretical and/or empirical perspective. We are interested in investigating a variety of factors surrounding this crisis including conflicts at the EU border, local and/or national responses (e.g. resistance or support for migrants), and media portrayal of the crisis. In this CFP, we invite papers that investigate the aforementioned topics as well as topics including, but not limited to:

• Contestation surrounding EU or member-state regulations governing migration and refugee status, including external pressure on EU member-states to accept refugees
• Conflicts at borders and challenges faced by both migrants and receiving member-states
• Policies or beliefs (real or mistaken) that make certain member-states more desirable destinations than other EU member-states for migrants
• Investigation of geographic tropes, discourse(s) and global imaginaries that contribute to perceptions of this surge of migrants as a “crisis”
• Motivating factors that are driving many of these migrants out of their homeland

This session is sponsored by the Political Geography and European Specialty Groups. Reece Jones will serve as discussant for this session. Please send proposed titles and abstracts of no more than 250 words by email to Kara Dempsey (dempseyke@appstate.edu) by Monday, October 19, 2015.

Deadline extended to October 22.

Call for papers for the AAG annual meeting, San Francisco, March 29 – April 2, 2016

Locating Humanitarian Violence: Persistence, Circulation, Emergence.

Organisers: Andrew Merrill, Ben Butler and Killian McCormack (University of Toronto)

Although grounded in an ostensible universal morality and frequently couched in the therapeutic rhetoric of human rights and security, a hierarchy of life underpins humanitarian responses and practices, with different lives and bodies valued over others in a broader regime of biopolitical regulation. Humanitarian violence requires the mobilization and intersection of a variety of knowledges, logics, infrastructures and bodies both beyond and within traditional studies of security and militarism. This session is interested in contemporary perspectives, particularly those informed by feminist, queer and post-colonial scholarships, interrogating the materialities, embodiments, epistemic frames and ideologies that are deployed and circulated in the production of humanitarian violence. We invite papers that challenge the assumptions and presuppositions of humanitarian discourse, and that confront the material and epistemic violence that is obscured through invocations of humanitarianism. Please submit abstracts of no more than 300 words to Andrew Merrill (andrew.merrill@mail.utoronto.ca), Ben Butler (benjamin.butler@mail.utoronto.ca) and Killian McCormack (k.mccormack@mail.utoronto.ca) by October 22, 2015. Notification of acceptance will be sent out the week of October 26, 2015.

Possible paper topics include:

–       Relocating Humanitarian Crises and Militarised Response to the Global North

–       Refugees, Conflict and the Site of Humanitarianism

–       Worlding Humanitarian Violence

–       Natural Disaster, Militarised Response and Displacement

–       Transnational Circulations of Populations and the Logistics of Violence

–       Seeking Humanitarian Response

–       Suffering, Ethics and Humanitarianism

–       Geoeconomics of Humanitarian Response

–       Reconstruction and the Consequences of Humanitarian Violence

–       Humanitarian War and State Racism

–       Defining Humanitarian Crises (e.g., Canadian First Nations Reserves, Racialized Ghettoes)

–       War and Humanitarianism/War as Humanitarian

–       Affect, Humanitarianism and the Suffering Body

–       Settler Colonialism and the Production of the Humanitarian Subject

–       Resisting Militarism and Humanitarian Violence

–       Law and Humanitarianism

Keywords:

• Bodies

• Embodiment

• Militarism

• Materiality

• Humanitarianism

• War

• History

• Reconstruction

• Colonialism

• Race

• Security

• Development

• Affect

• Disaster/Crisis

• Geopolitics

• Geoeconomics

• Queer Theory

• Feminist Theory

Call For Papers: American Association of Geographers (AAG), Annual Meeting, San Francisco, CA. March 29th – April 2nd, 2016.

Interrogating the Anthropocene in the Himalayan Region: Hazards, Infrastructure, and Environmental Justice. 

**This session is part of the Asia Symposium: Highlighting Asian Geographies**  

Organizers:
Mabel Gergan, UNC Chapel Hill

Sponsored by the Polar Geography, Political Geography and Cultural and Ecology speciality groups of the Association of American Geographers (AAG) Annual Meeting, San Francisco, 29th March — 3rd April 2015.

Organisers : 

Michael J Laiho —m.j.laiho@durham.ac.uk

Department of Geography & Durham Energy Institute, Durham University.

Brice Perombelon — brice.perombelon@ouce.ox.ac.uk

School of Geography and the Environment, University of Oxford.

Abstract :

Competition over resources, land and people in the Arctic have recently increased following  the effects of climate change on local, regional and national political systems. Resource multinational corporations, national States as well as regional and local socio-economic actors are now competing for the right to control the access to these ore-rich frozen landscapes. However, this is more than a simple contest for ownership of space. It is indeed the continuation of a historical phenomenon of neo-colonialisation which has seen the North’s indigenous peoples dispossessed of their land in order to facilitate the continuous accumulation of capital in the hands of external actors (Harvey, 2003).

Following this trend, it has been emphasised that Arctic States are now attempting to define the North’s identity solely in terms of potentialities for future economic development (Sejersen, 2015). This simply renders the indigenous interpretation of tradition, of the past as alive and ontologically part of Arctic space, obsolete. This is particularly true with regards to a shared view, among non-indigenous Arctic actors, of nature as subservient to the social world and to its economic and political needs. In practice, this has taken the form of Arctic geopolitical entities such as Canada or the EU actively seeking to claim and govern ‘their’ Arctic space. In order to do so, they have implemented sustainable development policies, which in effect aim to facilitate the exploration and exploitation of Arctic resources.

In line with indigenous interpretations, this project sees Arctic nature as (a) non-human being(s) endowed with multiple agencies and asks, rather provocatively, whether sustainable development in the Arctic is possible? Drawing from an innovative decolonial epistemological stance (Smith, 2012) the organisers of this session call for a collection of papers that can help understand the interplay between the State (and/or States), multinational resource exploitation corporations, indigenous peoples and non-human actors in the shaping, implementation and functioning of these sustainable development strategies and their effects on nature. We hope to better understand the nexus between the political economy, geography and ecology of the Arctic in the context of these co-occuring, sometimes opposing, often dominating material-semiotic systems. The main outcome of this session will be to develop a comprehensive account of power/knowledge dynamics related to environmental change in the Circumpolar North.

Different perceptions of Arctic environment, development and social movements (Peet and Watts 1996) as well as [sic] contextual, conflictual, consensual and messy spatialities of polar geopolitics are all relevant to the session (Powell and Dodds 2014). Theoretical and methodological approaches should therefore elaborate on the multiple epistemological groundings that give rise, in a post-colonial context, to various practices of governance via strategies of territorialisation and subjectivation (Elden, 2013; Foucault, 1980, 1993; Coulthard, 2014). We are particularly interested in the process that give rise to human and non-human materialities that inscribe the phenomenological development of resource frontiers in the historical emergence of State/corporate behaviour towards nature and Arctic space and place (Nuttall, 2010; Bridge and Le Billion, 2013; Bridge, 2009; Steinberg, 1995; Cronon, 1995; Mitchell, 2011).

Questions exploring Arctic space and place include but are not limited to the following :

• 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?

Please send all abstracts (including your name, affiliation and registration code) to session organisers by the 21st October 2015. For more information on the requirements of the AAG see: http://www.aag.org/cs/annualmeeting/call_for_papers

References :  

Bridge, G. and Le Billon, P. (2013) Oil. Cambridge: Polity Press.

Bridge, G. (2009) ‘Material Worlds: Natural Resources, Resource Geography and the Material Economy.’ Geography Compass 3 (3) 1217-1244.

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

Cronon, W. (1995) Uncommon Ground: Toward Reinventing Nature. New York: W. W. Norton and Co.

Elden, S. (2013) The Birth of Territory. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press.

Foucault, M. (1993). ‘About the Beginning of the Hermeneutics of the Self: Two Lectures at Dartmouth.’ Political Theory 21 (2) 198-227.

Foucault, M. (1980) Power/Knowledge: selected interviews and other writings. London: The Harvester Press.

Harvey, D. (2003). The New Imperialism. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Mitchell, T. (2011) Carbon Democracy. London and New York: Verso.

Nuttall, M. (2010) Pipeline Dreams: people, environment, and the Arctic energy frontier. Copenhagen: IWGIA.

Peet, R. and Watts, M. J. (1996) Liberation ecologies: environment, development, social movements. London: Routledge.

Powell, R. and Dodds, K. (2014) Polar Geography? Knowledges, resources and legal regimes. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar Publishing.

Sejersen, F. (2015) Future-makers in the Arctic. A critical view on globalisation, urbanisation and change. Keynote, Aalborg, August 12-15, 2015 at Postgraduate summer school “Change and Continuation in the Arctic,” University of Aalborg.

Steinberg, P. E. (2001) The Social Construction of Oceans. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Smith, L.T. (2012). Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples. 2nd Edition. London: Zed Books.