Small-Scale and Urban Mining: The Shadow Circuits and Afterlives of Minerals

Call for Papers – Association of American Geographers Annual Meeting

San Francisco, March 29 – April 2, 2016

Organizers:

Cynthia Morinville: Department of Geography and Planning, University of Toronto

Andrea Marston: Geography Department, UC Berkeley

Discussants:

Nancy Lee Peluso: Department of Environment, Science, Policy, and Management, UC Berkeley

Rajyashree Narayanareddy: Department of Geography and Planning, University of Toronto

Mineral extraction, consumption, and disposal are often understood as a unidirectional “chain” leading from the open pit mine to the urban landfill. While such a linear lens can be illuminating when trained on the movement of global capital, it can also obscure the practices that emerge in its shadows – practices that in many ways enable and sustain the primary commodity chain. More specifically, it can obscure “artisanal and small-scale mining” operations (ASM), which are becoming increasingly widespread in countries as diverse as Ghana, Brazil, China, and Indonesia (Tschakert 2009; Veiga and Hinton 2002; Shen and Gunson 2006; Peluso 2015), and the more recently emerging growth of “urban mining,” or the manual search for recyclable metals in electronic waste in countries such as Ghana, Nigeria, South Africa, China and India (Lepawsky and McNabb 2010). The number of people involved in both of these livelihood strategies is growing in tandem with the global informalization of labor, the (now flagging) commodity boom, the technification of industrial mining, and ongoing urbanization.

Despite increasing academic interest in small-scale mining, urban mining, and “informal economies” writ large, these practices are usually examined in isolation both from one another and from formal/large-scale economic processes. Such a conceptual framing encourages the reduction of both processes to matters of technological or regulatory debate, with academics and policymakers arrayed along a spectrum that includes those who cautiously celebrate small-scale and urban mining as entrepreneurial or potentially empowering (Oteng-Ababio 2012; Hinton et al. 2003; Noetstaller 1987), those who primarily critique appalling labor conditions and environmental contamination (Williams 2011; Williams et al. 2008; Pucket and Smith 2002; Osibanjo and Nnorom 2007), and those who seek to make these shadow circuits “productive” by encouraging alliances between small-scale and large-scale operators (Reddy 2015).

We will be hosting 1-2 paper sessions that explore some of these shadow circuits and afterlives of mineral (re)extraction. We invite critical approaches to small-scale, urban, and/or informal aspects of mineral extraction taking place in post-closure mines, e-waste sites and landfills, and other shadow spaces of extraction. Particularly compelling would be work that seeks to understand these shadow circuits in relation to metatheories of extraction, production, and consumption – and in relation to one another. Potential paper topics include (but are not limited to):

• Reconceptualizations of small-scale, artisanal, informal and/or urban mining

• Beyond commodity chains: circular economies, cradle to cradle, metabolic flows, etc.

• Small-scale/urban mining relations with large-scale/private/state entities

• Role of development agencies in shaping shadow circuits

• New materialist approaches to metals and minerals

• Forms of expertise (e.g. “appropriate technology,” participatory monitoring programs, etc.)

• Small-scale/urban mining in relation to race, indigeneity, and/or ethnicity

• Post-closure mine politics/the afterlives of mines and metals

• Mines and e-waste sites as ruins

• Discard studies, waste as resources

• Labour politics: precarity, informality, social organization, etc.

• Environmental and social justice

• Post/de-colonial perspectives

Please send abstracts to Cynthia Morinville (cynthia.morinville@mail.utoronto.ca) and Andrea Marston (ajmarston@berkeley.edu) by October 16, 2016.

CFP San Francisco AAG: Transformations of property and land in the contemporary political economy.

Organizers: James DeFilippis, Joseph Pierce, and Deborah Martin

Land and, its politically constructed form, property, have always been central components of the capitalist political economy. While historically this was predominantly in the form of being a “factor of production” that role has been joined in the last few decades by land being a financialized asset. But the meanings, nature, and character of land and property have always been constructed, and such constructions, while sometimes seeming permanent, have always been contested.

In this session we will be exploring the ways in which alternative and oppositional forms of land and property are being constructed in the contemporary political economy. Such transformations of land and property are an ongoing endeavor and their political implications and meanings are themselves unfixed and dynamic. Papers exploring these issues could focus on issues in the United States, about:

• Squatting
• Community Land Trusts
• Limited-equity cooperatives and other forms of shared equity housing
• Rural land reform movements
• The “commons” in our time
• Political contestations in and to property or land “regularization”

Please send proposed paper titles and abstracts (250 words or fewer) to demartin@clarku.edu by Oct 24, 2015.

​We’d love a couple more papers to fill these sessions! Deadline can be extended to Friday 17 October!

AAG 2016 // 29 March – 2 April 2016, San Francisco, CA

Second CFP: Uncertain futures and everyday hedging

In her prophetic novel, The Almanac of the Dead, Leslie Marmon Silko depicts the dystopic future visions of a super-elite, who plan to de-camp earth for socially purified satellite space colonies. She writes

Lazily orbiting in the glass and steel cocoons of these elaborate “biospheres,” the rich need not fear the rabble while they enjoyed their “natural settings” complete with freshwater pools and jungles filled with rare parrots and orchids…At the end the last of the clean water and the uncontaminated soil, the last healthy animals and plants, would be removed from the earth to the orbiting biospheres to “protect” them from the pollution on earth.

                                                                  (Silko, 1991: 728)

Set across the Americas, the sprawling de-colonial novel explores the various ways in which differently situated actors respond to a future they imagine suffused with violence and looming with social, environmental, spiritual and economic catastrophe. Back on earth, visions of the <future uncertain> likewise produce divergent modes of assessing, negotiating and coming to terms with risk—from financialization, to planning for resilience, to shifting the burden down the line through produced forms of hyper-vulnerability.

In this set of sessions, we seek papers that address the everyday hedging and imaginaries of stochastic risk and uncertainty that shape living and livelihoods all over the world (Zeiderman et al 2015). While knowledge about sociality, the changing climate and the world in general expands logarithmically as a result of technological innovations that produce ‘big data,’ whole “regions of experience” are left out—not only unknown, but fundamentally indecipherable (Simone, 2015). How do the varying techniques of knowing and coming to terms with uncertainty and the future—the gut feeling, modeling, faith, financialization—come together and get negotiated in different contexts across the globe? What modes of movement and circulation do they provoke, in both rural and urban settings? How is the unknowable seized or put to use for the opportunities that are exposed in the gaps between differing ways of understanding, anticipating and responding to risk?

We invite papers that take up questions related to the future, uncertainty and risk. These might include:

• Sociality of risk spreading
• Movement and circulation around the city, or across borders/oceans
• Experimental sociality
• The uneven impacts of managing for or experiencing uncertainty
• The spatialization of risk
• Everyday financialization and optionality
• Spatial and scalar effects of various forms of hedging
• Access to hedging
• Differential interpretations of future uncertainty and risk
• Produced precarity

In broadly considering these terms, we hope to draw distinct forms of thinking about the uncertain future into conversation across conventional analytical boundaries—i.e. those distinguishing the urban from the rural, the everyday from the global, science from sociality—while still attending to the specificities of each. Papers will be grouped according to commonalities, the paper sessions will be followed by a panel discussion which will seek to draw out lines of connection, synthesis and dissonance among the disparate work.

We strongly encourage scholars working in/on (cities in) Africa, Latin America, Asia and the Pacific to consider submitting.

Session Organizers    

Léonie Newhouse (Max Plank Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity)

Jamie Shinn (Geography, Texas A& M University)

Confirmed Discussants

AbdouMaliq Simone (MPI MMG/ African Centre for Cities/Goldsmiths/ Rujak Center for Urban Studies)

Alex Schafran (Leeds University)

Specialty Group Sponsorships:

Cultural and Political Ecology Specialty Group

For those interested in presenting a paper, please send along the following to newhouse@mmg.mpg.de andjamieshinn@tamu.edu by 17 October:

• Name, affiliation
• Paper abstract (250 word max)
• Brief bio-sketch (250 word max)

A decision will be communicated by 20 October, and selected participants should ensure that they have registered for the conference (which requires paying the fee) and submitted their abstracts by the general conference deadline 29 October. Full papers will be circulated a month prior to the conference to encourage productive dialogue among and between participants and to give the discussants sufficient time to consider the papers.

Queering Social Reproduction

Session Organizers: Max Andrucki (Temple University), Sarah Stinard-Kiel (Temple University), and Paul Jackson (University of Delaware)

We are seeking to organize a series of sessions at the 2016 AAG around what we are calling “Queering Social Reproduction”. We are indebted to, but committed to pushing beyond, the recent waves of feminist geographic thinking on social reproduction. Our aim is to grapple with difference, collectivity and new forms of claims making around social reproduction that are in many ways queer and perhaps might be simultaneously unrecognized and overdetermined. This is partly inspired by the current centrality of the figure of the LGBT/Q family in US and Western liberalism. We take seriously arguments about the incorporation of queer families and reproductivities into structures of late capitalism, but we would like to push thinking about queer reproduction further, particularly beyond the figure of the child, to open up space for chosen families, kinships with non-human others, and non-regenerative modes of relationships. We welcome papers that address other forms of queer family and sociality, including those which engage with concepts of queer time, sexual practices, or human/nonhuman assemblages, as a mode of reproduction. This can potentially help us with new ways of conceptualizing queer community-making, place-making, home-making as social reproduction, and move beyond debates about the rise and fall of gayborhoods and the implications for entrepreneurial urbanism.

Like many, we have been thinking about how the triumph of the gay marriage agenda can function as a regulatory ideal that serves to “re-privatize” social reproductive functions and foreclose other, perhaps queer-er, political possibilities. In this moment of transnational crisis and austerity, we welcome papers about the long history of prefigurative attempts to socialize or collectivize social reproduction, and we want to ask how these can be conceptualized not just as socialist/feminist/anarchist, but also queer. For child-rearing practices themselves, considering new agendas and forms of collectivity butts up against emerging ideas of the traumatized child and the pathologization of non-ideal childhoods through theories that locate non-normative domestic ecologies somatically, in children’s brains and bodies, as toxicities. We thus also welcome work that explores how queer, disability, and crip agendas can help us address new fears around generating the “wrong” kinds of reproductive biologies, and ultimately, non (re)productive citizens.

We are also committed to geographies of care and obligation, and how queering social reproduction might engender new ways of thinking about our responsibility to human and non-human others. We are thinking not just about cyborgian models of the post human, but about collective co-becomings, particularly those which enact new non-normative, non-market forms of care. Our goal is partly to understand how collective responsibilities of care, especially for un(re)productive surplus bodies like the elderly, chronically ill or those with disabilities, might have the potential to exceed conservative exclusivities so often associated with invocations of “community” and “family.” We invite papers that place care at the center of an inclusive project of “making kin” and are interested in how new responses of care and responsibility can shift everyday social relations and cohere new collectivities and new orientations.

If you are interested in participating in these sessions, please send an abstract to Max Andrucki (max.andrucki@temple.edu) by Monday, October 19, 2015.

*This session is being organized in collaboration with the paper session ‘De/Naturing Social Reproduction’. Contact wmck@uw.edu if interested in that one.

We are looking for one or two more papers to round out a second session, so have extended the deadline till Friday, October 16^th…

CFP: Tracing Heroes and Villains in the negotiation of spatial relationships

Annual Meeting of the Association of American Geographers

San Francisco March 29–April 2, 2016

Organizers: Arielle Hesse and Jennifer Titanski-Hooper; Penn State University

Discussant: Ingrid Nelson; University of Vermont

Heroes and villains operate within societies as figures of mythical largess, made, reborn, and reimagined through story telling, symbolism, and relevance to particular historical moments (Marples, 2007; Todorova, 2004). Marked by their performance of gender, class, race, sexuality, and ethnicity, they may figure as individuals of exceptional stature (i.e. heads of state, religious leaders) but also emerge from the everyday (as soldiers, mothers, police officers, workers, farmers, etc.) (Bickell, 2000; Dowler 2002; Nelson, 2015). In either case, heroes are known for their extraordinary actions, commitments, and beliefs in the face of adversity or injustice, challenges that are often embodied by an opposing force, in many instances, a villain.

The meanings of good and evil and the motivations for making and naming heroes and villains involve complex spatial processes that are rooted in, and reproduce, violences. Heroes and villains are invoked to both justify and challenge economic, social, and political ideas (Wright, 2001; Rodriguez, 2002). They are often deployed in the process of nation-building (Hobsbawm and Ranger, 1983; Johnson, 1995; Sharp, 2007), and as a consequence, in the construction of gendered, racialized, and sexualized ‘others’ (Dawson 1994; Gibson, et. al., 2001; Puar, 2002). As symbols that are used to defend or justify particular societal ideals, heroes produce difference across time and space. As such, one person’s hero can be another’s villain, and a hero today can be recast as a villain tomorrow as boundaries and objectives of inclusions and exclusions change. Heroes and villains present opportunities to trace shifting idealized norms, and analyze emergent reconfigurations of economic, political, and power relations.

The construction of heroes and villains is particularly germane to recent social and political happenings. The refugee crisis in Europe, recent media coverage of professional sports scandals, debates over the policing and militarization of urban space, the #Blacklivesmatter movement, and the ongoing struggles over energy resources, have all deployed images of heroes, villains, and victims to reinforce and challenge existing norms and power relations. Geography is well positioned to both analyze these constructions and complicate the binaries of ‘good’ and ‘evil’. Thus, this session seeks papers that draw on diverse empirical examples to show the complicated ways that heroes and villains act as tools of statecraft and political economy, but also shape the negotiation of everyday spatial practices.

We welcome research examining the construction or deployment of heroes and villains in:

• The construction of national identities, gendered identities
• Shifting configurations of Public and Private
• The militarized state
• The making of spectacle
• Shifting political economies
• ‘Counter’ Terrorism
• Public Health
• Social and Environmental movements

Please send proposed titles and abstracts of up to 250 words by October 16^th to: Arielle Hesse (alh359@psu.edu) or Jennifer Titanski-Hooper (jlt5409@psu.edu).

Call for Papers: Association of American Geographers (AAG) Annual Meeting,

29 March – 2 April 2016, San Francisco

Session:

After New Urbanism

Session Convenors: Dan Trudeau (Department of Geography, Macalester College, St. Paul, Minnesota, USA) and Susan Moore (Bartlett School of Planning, University College, London, UK).

The planning and design movement known as the New Urbanism, and its associated built forms, has firmly established itself as one of the most influential and prolific development trends of the last century in many parts of the world. New Urbanism can no longer be essentialized as the Seaside, Kentlands, ‘Truman Show’ version oft-referred to when describing the projects associated with the movement. The influence of New Urbanism, its principles, but more exceptionally, its built forms can be found in disparate places, including Masdar City (UAE), Lavasa (India), Jakriborg (Sweden), Orchid Bay (Belize), Melrose Arch (South America), Beacon Cove (Australia). In other words, the influence of New Urbanism is now apparent in every continent. What was largely characterised as a greenfield suburban trend or fad in the US has increasingly found expression through inner city and major regeneration projects in cities the world over.

Yet, the presumed universalism of it as a global suburban movement, with one singular point of origin and replicable template oversimplifies the significance of New Urbanism as a major development trend. The specificity of the (North) American fight against suburban sprawl, the promotion of transit-oriented development and the revitalization of community through traditional neighbourhood scale design practices and planning tools most often associated with the New Urbanism label, is not the ‘universal’ that has travelled and proliferated. Today, the movement has significantly expanded beyond the insular, domestic concerns of its ‘originators’. New Urbanism is now more than ever a heterogeneous movement that produces variegated built forms and communities and its influences are increasingly typified as part of mainstream development ‘best practice’. New Urbanism, it might be argued, is now the norm rather than the exception. In the 30 years since the New Urbanism gained notoriety as a ‘force’ to be reckoned with, we contend that it is time to seriously re-frame and de-universalise the assumptions of New Urbanism to draw critical attention to its heterogeneity, contingency and increasingly mainstream presence.

In this session we seek critical and empirically-driven papers from an international perspective which explore the extent to which it can be argued that we now have multiple New Urbanisms, with a hybridity of forms and processes generally acknowledged as ‘New Urbanist’, suggesting a social, economic and political complexity hitherto under-explored in the existing critiques of the movement as merely a reflection back onto itself (i.e. broken promises, aspirational visions, dubious ideologies, diversions from the original vision, etc.). More specifically, we seek to elaborate what an ‘after’ New Urbanism perspective might look like and how it might contribute to more critical studies of the typification of New Urbanism as mainstream development and planning best practice and the implications this has for better understanding its mobility and global reach.

Papers dealing with, but not limited to, the following themes are welcomed:

• Mainstreaming of New Urbanism in policy and practice
• Mobility of the movement in an ‘after’ New Urbanism era
• Divergence of practices and rationalities and yet a convergence of variegated urban forms in different international contexts that are recognizable as New Urbanism
• New Urbanism and its significance to understandings of post-suburban politics and governance
• Place-based contingencies in generating New Urbanism projects

Please send a 250 word abstract to Susan Moore (susan.moore@ucl.ac.uk) and Dan Trudeau (Trudeau@macalester.edu) by October 15^th.

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

New Discourses of the Old Nation-State: Territories, Identities, Practices

Session conveners: Ingrid A. Medby (Durham University, UK), and Berit Kristoffersen (UiT – The Arctic University of Norway)

Sponsored by the Political Geography Speciality Group and the Cultural Geography Speciality Group.

In a time of ever accelerating global interconnectedness, mobility, migration, and climate change, the state has frequently been relegated to political anachronisms in academic analysis. Despite decades of heralding the state as obsolete, however, it tenaciously persists as the primary unit of territorial, political, and bio-political organisation. Moreover, while congruence of borders, authority, and community may never have been more than an illusion, the Westphalian idea(l) of the culturally legitimate “nation-state” likewise persists, reifying state authority as this undergoes profound transformation. Thus, rather than seeing the state as a static, separate, monolithic and de-humanised entity in its own right, critical political geographers are increasingly attuned to its “peopled” (Jones, 2007) and prosaic (Painter, 2006) nature. As an idea and construct (Abrams, 1988), the state materialises as an effect of a range of practices (Mitchell 1993) and is actively transformed through socio-political struggles at various geographical scales (Brenner 2004).  

This session aims to interrogate how the state, the nation, or indeed the “nation-state” is re-negotiated, re-imagined, and re-interpreted in today’s world. Papers are invited that foster discussion of how territories and identities are formed and transformed in practice and throughpolitical imaginaries. The session thus aims to provide fresh perspectives on the meaning of statehood as performance and narrative.  

The session’s theme is designed to be broad in order to attract a wide range of perspectives with the aim of fostering dialogue on the state that goes beyond traditional state theory. Researchers are encouraged to submit abstracts that relate to topics broadly engaging with the above, and may include (but are not limited to):

The state/statehood as:

• Practices, performances, or ceremonies.
• Identity, nationalism, or citizenship.
• Borders, territories, or territoriality.
• Multiscaled, nested, or fragmented.
• Everyday, mundane, or banal.
• Discourses, ideas, or narratives.

Please email your abstract of no more than 250 words (or any questions you may have) to Ingrid A. Medby (i.a.medby@durham.ac.uk) by Monday 19^th October 2015. Please include affiliation, contact details, etc.

Successful applicants will be notified by 23^rd October, and will have to pay the registration fee and submit their abstracts online at the AAG website before 29^th October 2015.

Unfortunately no financial support towards travel/accommodation/registration can be provided by the session conveners.

References:

Abrams, P., 1988. Notes on the Difficulty of Studying the State [1977]. Journal of Historical Sociology 1, 58–89.

Brenner, N., 2004. New state spaces: Urban governance and rescaling of statehood. Oxford University Press, New York.

Jones, R., 2007. People/States/Territories: The Political Geographies of British State Transformation, RGS-IBG book series. Blackwell, Oxford.

Mitchell, T., 1991. The Limits of the State: Beyond Statist Approaches and Their Critics. The American Political Science Review 85(1), 77-96.

Painter, J., 2006. Prosaic geographies of stateness. Political Geography 25, 752–774. 

Yesterday, Jason Cone, MSF’s Executive Director in the U.S., issued a press release entitled, “Even War Has Rules: A Fact Sheet on the Bombing of Kunduz Hospital.” He wrote:

This was not just an attack on our hospital-it was an attack on the Geneva Conventions.… The Geneva Conventions are not just an abstract legal framework-they are the difference between life and death for medical teams on the frontline.

It is interesting to contrast Cone’s view to that of former Attorney General, Alberto Gonzales.  In his famous January 25, 2002 memo, he referred to Geneva Convention provisions as obsolete and quaint in light of the new war on terrorism.

This session is designed to examine these various positions on the Geneva Conventions and the laws of war more broadly (i.e., LOAC, IHL, etc.) by interrogating the relationship between the law and spatial logics and practices.  To this end, we hope to draw from legal geographies scholarship and focus especially on the transnational spatial and material dimensions of the law.  We invite papers on legal narrative and the disciplining function of law, as well as on operational issues, compliance problems, and any other aspect of implementation.  Historical as well as contemporary topics are welcome.

A few possible themes:

• Legitimizing function of the law
• Geopolitics and the LOAC
• Spatial protections
• Temporalities and the law
• Biopolitical dimensions of the law
• Legal standing and the subjects of IHL
• Legal pluralism and interlegality
• Customary practices
• Compliance and violations
• Spatial dimensions of key legal principles (e.g., proportionality, distinction, etc.)

Please submit a brief expression of interest to Margo Kleinfeld (kleinfem@uww.edu) as soon as possible; abstracts byOctober 23.