Call for Papers: “The ‘Other’ Side of the Bay: Contested Geographies of Oakland”

Association of American Geographers Annual Meeting

San Francisco, CA | March 29th – April 2nd, 2016

This session is sponsored by The “Oakland School” of Urban Studies, a graduate-student working group supported by the University of California Humanities Research Institute (UCHRI).[1]

Oakland, CA has long appeared at the margins of authoritative maps of U.S. and world cities. It has been seen as what geographer Jennifer Robinson (2002, 2006) calls an “ordinary city,” too “insignificant” to be considered a site of general knowledge about “the urban.” This is not to say that the city has been simply “off the map.” To the contrary, it has been incorporated into the representational geography and power geometry of the urban system in very particular ways—as subaltern, subcultural, and “pathological”—that have reinforced, however paradoxically, its marginality in mainstream urban discourses.

Recently, however, this has begun to change. Since the recession in 2008, Oakland has seen an influx of new residents and businesses, an extreme spike in the cost of housing, and an upsurge of positive media coverage that have had far-reaching, if uneven, effects on the city and its residents. Once (dis)regarded in terms of a highly racialized “image problem” (Rhomberg, 2004; Douzet, 2012), it has come to occupy an increasingly privileged position in the geographical imaginary and political economy of the Bay Area. At the same time, it has seen new rounds of racialized dispossession. Since 2011, over 10,000 homes—most of them concentrated in low-income communities of color—have been foreclosed (King, 2012), intensifying patterns of displacement that have resulted in the loss of over 34,000 African-American and Black-identified residents since 2000 (Rose & Lin, 2015). These contentious dynamics have put a spotlight on the city as a paradigmatic site in ongoing struggles over questions of housing affordability, economic and environmental justice, immigrant rights, Native land rights and recognition, and racialized state violence. There is thus a sense that something significant is happening in Oakland. But what that “something” is, or how to think about it, presents an increasing challenge for academics, activists, residents, and policymakers alike.

This session emerges out of the collaboration of The “Oakland School” of Urban Studies, a graduate-student working group supported by UCHRI. Meeting throughout the 2015-16 academic year, we aim to identify and tease apart the many lines of force that converge in and emanate from this contested city. We invite academics, artists, activists, and others working to think about and act upon this city in flux to join us as we attempt to define and debate the conjunctural moment in Oakland. What are the many processes working together to (re)shape the city? How do they relate to one another? How has the city been manufactured and mapped in the past? How is its status as a site and sign being transformed today? And to what extent do the much-discussed tropes of “gentrification,” “displacement,” “diversity,” and “state violence” express, obscure, and/or performatively enact this transformation in its many determinations?

While prioritizing work that specifically engages this city as its site of inquiry, we welcome papers not geographically centered on Oakland. These could be analyses that contribute to our understanding of how Oakland—as a place, process, and icon—is constructed and circulates in broader cultural discourses, policy spheres, and spatial and political imaginaries. They could also be analyses of other places that nevertheless demonstrate how a critical reading of “Oakland” allows us to think about contemporary urbanism more broadly in new ways.

Some potential themes include:

• militarization, surveillance, policing, and incarceration
• gentrification, displacement, and dispossession
• indigenous sovereignty, settler colonialism, and decolonization
• regional economic restructuring and changing geographies of the “tech” industry
• relationship between Oakland, San Francisco, and other regional centers
• affordable housing
• environmental justice
• comparative racialization
• transnationalism and immigrant justice
• multiculturalism and consumption
• queer politics
• cultural productive and expressive cultures
• public space
• cultural politics of belonging
• urban citizenship and rights to the city
• political organizing and social movements

Please email abstracts of up to 250 words to oaklandschoolaag@gmail.com by October 15, 2015. We will send out notifications about acceptance by October 22.

For more information about the AAG annual meeting, including registration fees, dates, etc., please see:www.aag.org/cs/annualmeeting.

For more information and ongoing updates about our group, The “Oakland School” of Urban Studies, please see:www.oaklandschool.ucdavis.edu (coming in early October).

References

Douzet, Frédérick. (2012). The Color of Power: Racial Coalitions and Political Power in Oakland. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press.

King, Steve. (2012). Who Owns Your Neighborhood? The Role of Investors in Post-Foreclosure Oakland. Oakland: Urban Strategies Council.

Rose, Kalima & Lin, Margaretta. (2015). A Roadmap Towards Equity: Housing Solutions for Oakland, California. Oakland: PolicyLink.

Rhomberg, Chris. (2004). No There There: Race, Class, and Political Community in Oakland.Berkeley: University of California Press.

Robinson, Jennifer. (2002). Global and world cities: A view from off the map. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 26(3), 531-54.

______. (2006). Ordinary Cities: Between Modernity and Development. New York: Routledge.

[1] Angela Aguilar, Ethnic Studies, UC Berkeley; Trisha Barua, Cultural Studies, UC Davis; Savannah Kilner, Gender Studies, UCLA; Allison Logan, Sociology, UC Berkeley; Eli Marienthal, Geography, UC Berkeley; Erin McElroy, Feminist Studies, UC Santa Cruz; Andrea Miller, Cultural Studies, UC Davis; Dorie Perez, Interdisciplinary Humanities, UC Merced; Magie Ramírez, Geography, University of Washington; Divya Sundar, City and Regional Planning, UC Berkeley; Alex Werth, Geography, UC Berkeley

Call for Papers: Legal geographies

Association of American Geographers

2016 Annual Meeting in San Francisco March 29-April 2

Co-organizers

Melinda Harm Benson and John Carr

University of New Mexico, Geography and Environmental Studies

In their edited volume Expanding the Spaces of Law (2014), Irus Braverman, Nicholas Blomley, David Delaney and Alexandre (Sandy) Kedar identify three main streams or modes of scholarship in legal geography to date: (1) disciplinary work in law or in geography that is modeled on the conventional image of import and export (2) interdisciplinary pursuit in which scholars in the eponymous fields draw on the work of each other and seek to contribute to the development of a common project and (3) investigations that move beyond legal geography to trans-disciplinary, or perhaps even post-disciplinary, modes of scholarship. Within the third category, investigative approaches increasingly emphasize performativity as a basis of inquiry.  Braverman and her colleagues describe performance theory as form of open-ended social constructionism that places an emphasis on the iterative and citational nature of performances that, in their complex assemblages, stabilize particular social arrangements.  An emphasis on how law is performed highlights its ontological role (Blomley 2013).  These performances take place in the “everyday”—situations ranging from the daycare center and the supermarket to the football stadium and the national park.

We invite papers and across the various modes of scholarship.  Past sessions have been organized around themes including: law/colonialism/capitalism, property, methods, political economy/law and human/environment/law.

Interested contributors should contact mhbenson@unm.edu by October 21, 2015.

Please send this on to other individuals or specialty groups that may be interested in this call.  Hope to see you in San Francisco!

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 10^th to: Arielle Hesse (alh359@psu.edu) or Jennifer Titanski-Hooper (jlt5409@psu.edu).

Title: Call for Papers/Panelists: The post-post-Soviet space? Interrogating the region in the quarter century since communism’s end

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 16, 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

Edited Collection: Rethinking Globalization and Spatial Scale

We are seeking articles for an edited collection titledRethinking Globalization and Spatial Scale. The goal of the volume is to bring together interdisciplinary research on globalization spanning the humanities and social sciences that foregrounds theoretical and methodological conceptualizations of scale-how people, capital, goods, material infrastructure, ideas, and power aggregate along or slide among different degrees or levels of attachment, from personal to local to national to transnational.

We are assembling essays that reconnect the seemingly different registers of scale to reconsider how scholars use scale to understand the operations of power and to retheorize the primary conceptual categories of historical and modern life (such as those central binaries of local and global, center and periphery, west and non-west). We expect the edited collection to extend beyond the recent spatial and transnational turn in the academy by focusing on scale as a material indicator of, and active agent in, the constitution of the world.

The interdisciplinary range of the collection will be broad; we currently have commitments from prominent scholars in literary studies, history, communications, and geography. Several university and trade publishers have expressed early and very strong interest in the project.

Please send a brief CV and a 500-word abstract toglobalspatialscale.collection@gmail.com outlining your proposed essay submission.

Co-editors: James Mulholland, Rebecca Walsh, and Steve Wiley

James Mulholland is an assistant professor of English at North Carolina State University specializing in eighteenth-century British literature and empire. He has published Sounding Imperial: Poetic Voice and the Politics of Empire, 1730-1820(Johns Hopkins, 2013). His next project is calledLiterary Calcutta: Transregional Networks of a Colonial City.

Rebecca Walsh is an assistant professor of English at North Carolina State University focusing on transatlantic and transnational modernisms. She has published Geopoetics of Modernism (University of Florida Press, 2015), which examines the connections between literary modernism and academic and middlebrow geography in a global context, and is at work on a new monograph on the transnational networks of African-American and Indian resistance movements.

Steve Wiley is an associate professor of communication at North Carolina State Universitywhose ethnographic research focuses media technologies, globalization, and sense of place.  His work has appeared in Communication Theory, Cultural Studies, and Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies. He is the co-editor, with Jeremy Packer, of Communication Matters: Materialist Approaches to Media, Mobility and Networks (Routledge, 2013).

Call for Papers:

Association of American Geographers (AAG) Annual Meeting,

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

 

Session:

Adaptation Hegemonies: 

Knowledge, Governance and Development Confronting Climate Change

Organizers:

 

Kasia Paprocki (Cornell University)

Alejandro Camargo (Syracuse University)

 

Discussant:

 

Michael Watts (University of California, Berkeley)

 

As the threat and implications of climate change are confronted at both global and local scales, the epistemology of contemporary climate science is characterized by the following paradox: despite high confidence in scientific knowledge of the dynamics of global anthropogenic climate change, uncertainty prevails in our understanding of how these dynamics will converge with diverse localized ecologies and political economies. This uncertainty has become more evident in the emergence of new modes of governing in the name of adaptation, which today dominates the development landscape throughout communities that are seen to be at greatest risk. As many other forms of governance, adaptation has emerged as a normative process involving coercion, command, and control. Furthermore, it is fundamentally grounded in particular visions of possible futures, success, failure, and what it means to be “developed.” Under these principles, adaptation regimes delineate political geographies of risk and mold people’s lives in light of catastrophic and uncertain notions of the time to come (Watts 2015).

This session aims at bringing together papers that critically reflect on adaptation as a hegemonic mode of governance, and that problematize its (dis)articulations with local/global political economic processes.

Questions we seek to examine include (but are not limited to):

In what ways is adaptation science “new”?

How are calls, claims and programs for adaptation embedded in historical patterns of development?

What is the relationship between adaptation regimes and the present and future of capitalism?

What is the role of the state in the formation and legitimation of adaptation regimes of governance?

How are science and knowledge mobilized in pursuit of adaptation hegemonies?

In what ways are these hegemonies locally adopted, resisted, or reconfigured?

 

Watts, M. (2015). Now and then: the origins of political ecology and the rebirth of adaptation as a form of thought. In Perreault, T., Bridge, G. and McCarthy, J. (eds) 2015, The Routledge Handbook of Political Ecology, pp 19-50. London: Routledge.

 

We invite potential presenters to submit their abstracts (500 words max) to kp354@cornell.edu andfacamarg@syr.edu by Sunday, October 4^th. We will confirm participation by Friday, October 16^th.

AAG 2016  //  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.

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)

We strongly encourage scholars working in/on (cities in) Africa, Latin America, Asia and the Pacific to consider submitting. ​For those interested in presenting a paper, please send along the following tonewhouse@mmg.mpg.de andjamieshinn@tamu.edu by 13 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

Call for papers: American Association of Geographers Annual Meeting, San Francisco, California, 29 March – 2 April, 2016

Session title: New geographies of war

Organizers: Steven Radil, University of Idaho; Olivier Walther, University of Southern Denmark

Session description: Recent scholarship claims that the phenomenon of war is waning (Pinker 2011). These claims stand in stark contrast to the growing ‘new war’ literature that posits emergent forms of war that involve a variety of new political actors (Kaldor 2012) and, presumably, new spatial arrangements of political power and geopolitical imaginaries. Geographers have played an important role in some debates about war by clarifying the constructed spatial economies of war (Le Billion 2001); drawing attention to the biopolitics of war (Hyndman 2012); showing how war is central to the construction of everyday places and spaces far away from battle zones (Graham 2006); and exploring how geographic technology is implicated in the production of some types of war (Beck 2003). Although geographers have had less to say about the possibly changing nature of war itself, geographic scholarship has much to offer the ‘new war’ debates.

We envision a session that brings together recent geographic scholarship on war that explores themes such as:

Geographic approaches to the ‘new war’ hypothesis

New spatialities of political power

Emergent transnational political networks and movements

Innovative geographic methodologies to the study of war

Contextual approaches to recent civil wars and insurgencies

Contagion effects of war

New dimensions to the normalization and pervasiveness of war

We invite papers on these or related topics. Please send proposed titles and abstracts (250 words or less) and/or expressions of interest to both Steven Radil (sradil@uidaho.edu) and Olivier Walther (ow@sam.sdu.dk) no later than 15 October, 2015.

Sponsored by the Political Geography Specialty Group.

References:

Beck, R. A. (2003). Remote sensing and GIS as counterterrorism tools in the Afghanistan war: A case study of the Zhawar Kili region. The Professional Geographer, 55(2), 170-179.

Graham, S. (2006). Cities and the ‘War on Terror’. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 30(2), 255-276.

Hyndman, J. (2012). The geopolitics of migration and mobility. Geopolitics, 17(2), 243-255.

Kaldor, M. (2012). New and old wars: Organized violence in a global era. 3rd Ed. Malden, MA: Polity.

Le Billon, P. (2001). The political ecology of war: natural resources and armed conflicts. Political Geography, 20(5), 561-584.

Pinker, S. (2011). The better angels of our nature: Why violence has declined. New York: Viking.