The deadline for the Political Geography Specialty Group’s 2021 Student Awards is January 31, 2021. Please consider applying. Please note that we have suspended our student travel awards for this year, though we hope to resume them next year.

The Latin America Specialty Group of the AAG invites submissions for two 2021 awards:

• LASG Best Student Paper Award
• LASG Student Field Study Award (Note: This award is intended to defray preliminary research expenses for theses and dissertations focused on/in Latin America. Due to the ongoing Covid19 pandemic, there is greater flexibility in research expenses that will be considered for funding this year. Support for tele-interviews, local archival work, other exploratory data acquisition, for example, is eligible. Expenses such as childcare while conducting research are also considered valid)

Please find the award descriptions and instructions in the attached documents. All submissions should be sent via email to Dr. Audrey Joslin (ajoslin@ksu.edu) no later than February 26, 2021. 

Further information about LASG can be found: community.aag.org/lasg/home   This site also has the info about the Awards under the ‘Student Awards’ tab

Faculty members: If you’re willing and able to serve on either of the ad-hoc committees to evaluate proposals, please also let Dr. Andrea Marston (andrea.marston@rutgers.edu) and Dr. Audrey Joslin (ajoslin@ksu.edu) know via email.

2021 Indigenous Peoples Specialty Group Graduate Student Paper Competition: 
Submission Deadline: March 8th, 2021

The Indigenous Peoples Specialty Group (IPSG) invites submissions for its annual Graduate Student Paper Competition in conjunction with the 2021 AAG general meeting, April 7-11, in Seattle, Washington (virtual meeting). We invite graduate student papers addressing Indigenous critical cartography, geographic research, education, methodologies, and/or theory. Special consideration will be given to papers that:

• Foster geographic research and education that involves the Indigenous peoples of the world, past and present
• Prioritize Indigenous people(s)’ perspectives, voices, and epistemologies
• Encourage approaches to research and teaching that support Indigenous goals of self-determination
• Help build relationships of mutual trust between Indigenous communities and academic geographers
• Contribute to decolonizing the discipline and practice of Geography
• The award for the top student paper includes a cash award of US $150.00 and a one-year honorary student membership in the IPSG. Eligible papers for this competition must conform to the following guidelines:

Paper Requirements:

• The paper must be a written manuscript. Manuscripts sole-authored by a graduate student are preferred; however, manuscripts co-authored in collaboration with a person/people at the community- scale will also be considered. Papers co-authored with a faculty member will not be considered.
• The paper needs to be presented at either the AAG annual meeting in Denver, any regional geography meeting, or another professional conference.
• Papers should be no longer than 3,000 words in length (the length limitations may mean that the applicant is submitting the “presentation” version, rather than the “publication” version of the paper).
• Papers should be in English, with translation provided for any quotes or sections in a language other than English.
• Papers will be evaluated by IPSG board members. The board reserves the right not to award a prize if submissions are not of sufficient quality.

Interested students should submit a copy of their conference paper electronically to IPSG Secretary, Kate Schlott, at kschlott@gradcenter.cuny.edu. Please put “IPSG Student Paper Submission” in the subject line. Any questions about the competition can also be directed to Kate.

8^th EUGEO CONGRESS ON THE GEOGRAPHY OF EUROPE

June 28 – July 1, 2021, Prague, Czechia

Call for paper for the session:

Migration and climate: a fallacious relationship

Session supported by the IGU Commission of Political Geography

Organizers:

Anna Casaglia (University of Trento); Jussi Laine (University of Eastern Finland)

Land erosion, melting glaciers, rising sea levels, floods and drought, and other increasingly frequent and extreme climatic phenomena are radically transforming people’s relation with the environment. The present climate scenario is often framed, at the political level, as a security issue. At the European level, attention has been particularly paid on  climate change’s presumed primary or secondary outcomes, such as geopolitical instability, armed conflict, or environmental migration.

The connection between climate change and human migration is often understood in relatively narrow terms.  Several studies have put into discussion the correlation between climate change and conflicts (Selby J. et al, 2017; Barnett, J., Adger, W.N. 2007; Raleigh, C., Urdal, H. 2007) as well as between climate change and migration from poor countries (Abel G.J. et al. 2019; Reuveny, R. 2007). However, the general assumption is that the climate crisis is directly causing the movement of people from the Global South to the Global North, and the mainstream understanding of climate security insists on underlining the threats posed by environmental degradation to either territorial integrity, human security, or international stability (McDonald 2013) .

The identification of climate migration as a security threat is part of a discourse that concentrates on state security and identifies possible responses in the securitization of borders and mitigation strategies. Among other dangerous effects, taking into account migration as a direct outcome of climate change means avoiding facing its root causes and denying the geopolitical relations of power and colonialism (past and present) that have configured the landscape of the global South. This perspective, on the other hand, allows escaping the responsibility to adopt measures to reduce fossil fuel consumption and decrease emissions (Dalby 2009).

With this panel, we seek to gather presentations critically discussing so-called “climate migration”, both in relation to the actual causes of mobility in the first place, and to the lack of proper political responses by the EU in dealing with the consequences of the climate crisis. Moreover, we aim at promoting a reflection on the dangerous outcomes of the process of securitization of both environmental degradation and global migration, especially in their interweaving.

We invite submissions of papers that include, but are not limited to, the following topics:

–       The critique of predominant assumptions of causality between the climate crisis and global migration

–       The diverse and coexisting mobility responses to climate change

–       The political nature of climate injustice

–       The colonial genealogy of the climate crisis and related forced mobility

–       European responses to global migration and the so-called climate migration

Selected works from the session will be invited to submit an extended version of their accepted paper to a post-conference special issue in a top-tier international journal. This call is also open to authors that could not participate in the conference, provided the paper fits within the scope of this special issue and that an extended abstract of the paper has been approved by the guest editors. More information is to follow.

Abstract submission deadline: 31 January 2021

To submit your abstract: https://www.eugeo2021.eu/abstracts/

For any information on the session: anna.casaglia@unitn.it and/or jussi.laine@uef.fi

RGS 2021 Annual International Conference, London 31 Aug to 3 Sept 2021

Negotiating racialised, gendered and classed borders within urban political movements

Conveners: Dr Matina Kapsali and Dr Maria Karagianni (both at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki)

Sponsorship: Postgraduate Forum (PGF) of the RGS-IBG

Over the past few years, a wave of urban political movements has sprung out in many cities around the world. These movements range from anti-austerity urban mobilisations and grassroots initiatives that create material and immaterial solidarity structures to refugee solidarity initiatives such as self-organised refugee squats. Urban geographers stress that these political movements nurture radical political imaginaries and construct spaces of urban commoning by disrupting the existing order and experimenting with new ways of being and living in common (García-Lamarca, 2015; Roussos, 2019; Kapsali 2020; Montagna and Grazioli, 2019). These urban political movements differ greatly from the urban social movements that sprung out over the past three decades (Karaliotas and Swyngedouw, 2019). They are deeply political, insurgent and imaginative but they are also much more heterogeneous internally. They emerge through the mobilisation of a heterogeneous population that forges multi-faceted alliances and solidarities: precarious workers, low-income people, students, queers, women, refugees and so on (Butler, 2015). This process of solidarity-building is characterised by multiple and shifting borders; borders that produce hierarchies and unevenness within the communities that struggle and emerge through the underlying cultural, gender, political and racialised differences of their participants (Noterman, 2016). In this context, borders are not conceived solely as territorial but also as social, cultural, political and economic (Mezzadra and Neilson, 2013).

This session aims to critically examine how gender, racialised, class, political and other types of differences create borders within urban political movements and solidarity spaces and the ways in which these borders are negotiated, re-enforced and/or blurred. In other words, the session seeks to shed light on the tensions, minor hierarchies and conflicts that characterise political spaces of solidarity. In parallel, it asks if and how these borders can be deconstructed and these differences bridged. We invite contributions that address, but are not limited, to one or more of the following themes:

• How are heterogeneity and difference made present and negotiated in political practices and common spaces?
• What borders are created in political common spaces and how and why are they created?
• How are these borders deconstructed through processes of collective political subjectification and urban commoning? Through which practices are existing differences in subject positions bridged and     privileges questioned?
• What are the challenges and limitations that urban political movements face, given the heterogeneity of their participants? Which tensions and conflicts emerge?
• Can heterogeneity and difference constitute a dynamic element of urban political movements and under which conditions?

Format: Online session

The session is organised in two parts. The first part lasts 1 hour and 15 minutes and includes 4 paper presentations (15 minutes each), followed by a short round of discussion. The second part lasts 25 minutes and is organised as a world café with short inputs (3 minutes). This part will enable the more active participation of presenters, convenors and the audience in the discussion and will provide room for networking.

Please send abstracts up to a maximum of 250 words including a proposed title and your affiliation to Matina Kapsali (skapsali@arch.auth.gr) and Maria Karagianni (mkaragi@arch.auth.gr) by Friday 19 February 2021.

Further information about the RGS-IBG 2020 conference can be found here: https://www.rgs.org/research/annual-international-conference/

References 

García-Lamarca, M. (2015) Insurgent Acts of Being-in-Common and Housing in Spain: Making Urban Commons? In: Dellenbaugh, M., Kip, M., Bieniok, M., Muller, A. K. & Schwegmann, M. (eds.) Urban Commons: Moving Beyond State and Market. Basel: Birkhäuser.

Kapsali, M. (2020) Political infrastructures of care: Collective home making in refugee solidarity squats, Radical Housing Journal, 2(2), pp. 13-34.

Mezzadra, S. & Neilson, B. (2013) Border as Method, or, the Multiplication of Labor: Duke University Press.

Montagna, N. & Grazioli, M. (2019) Urban commons and freedom of movement The housing struggles of recently arrived migrants in Rome. Citizenship Studies, 23(6), 577-592.

Noterman, E. (2016) Beyond Tragedy: Differential Commoning in a Manufactured Housing Cooperative. Antipode, 48(2), 433-452.

Roussos, K. (2019) Grassroots collective action within and beyond institutional and state solutions: the (re-)politicization of everyday life in crisis-ridden Greece. Social Movement Studies, 1-19.

2021 RGS Annual International Conference

Carcerality of and/or on the border

Borders are often carceral apparatus – that is apparatus that have incarcerating and exclusionary qualities – of bounding, containing, confining and restricting people and place. Likewise, carcerality – as a now established term used in subfields of the discipline – is concerned intimately with border regimes and politics through practices of spatiality, detriment and intent (Moran et al. 2018). This session seeks to interrogate borders and carcerality, beyond their often taken-for-granted status and connections, to better examine how they relate. It seeks to make space for thinking of borders through a carceral lens and the carceral through the lens of the border. Vitally, the session aims to push the very limits of border studies and carceral geographies beyond their implied linkage as spaces of physical bordering and the prison respectively. In doing so, we ask – what are the carceral characters of borders? How is carcerality present on the border? And in turn – locating carcerality beyond its typical spaces of concern – what different kinds of borders might be thought of as carceral? Can the ‘carceral’ border on new territory, where different kinds of borders – from the (air)port to the home – be thought of carcerally?

 We invite papers that tackle questions concerned with carcerality of and/or on the border. Topics might include but are not limited to:

• Borders and boundary crossings (e.g. considerations of various practices of migration)
• Negotiations of the prison boundary
• New territories of the carceral
• Scholarship that (re)considers the border of the discipline of (carceral) geography
• Scholarship that extends the boundary of existing work in carceral geography to case studies and empirical examples beyond the global north.

Please do not hesitate to get in touch regarding potential abstracts. We welcome scholars from across disciplines and career stages. The session will be held in online format.

 Submission details: Please email submissions to Anna Schliehe (aks79@cam.ac.uk) and Jennifer Turner (jennifer.turner@uni-oldenburg.de), including paper title and abstract (max 300 words), name(s) and affiliation(s) by 28^th February 2021

Call for papers 

 2021 RGS-IBG Annual Conference, London, Tuesday 31 August – Friday 3 September.

The theme of the conference is borders, borderlands, and bordering.

Elemental borderscapes: materialities, politics, and encounters 

Conveners: James Riding (Newcastle University) & Carl Dahlman (Miami University, Ohio)

Format: Paper Session (in-person if possible)

Sponsorship: (Applying to) the Social and Cultural Geography Research Group (SCGRG) & the Political Geography Research Group (PolGRG)

Deadline for submissions: Friday, February 26, 2021

The ‘surface area’ of France, is 528,576 square kilometres. For roughly 2,640 kilometres, this territory is bordered by a maritime space constituting ‘territorial waters’, the entire surface area of the national territory is surrounded by an ‘air space’, the defence, integrity and security of these three spaces, terrestrial, maritime and aerial, are the object of constant concern on the part of the authorities (Perec, 2008: 73-75).

Geographers and others have begun to tease out the ontological, epistemological, and ethico-political implications of thinking about and with the elemental (Engelmann and McCormack, 2018; Squire, 2016). Encounters between traditional elements like water, earth, and air in borderscapes enable us to complicate conceptualisations of the border and borderlands (Riding and Dahlman, 2021; Wilson, 2017). When we think of elemental borders, tracing mountain ranges or a river valley, skirting the shores of seas and the depths of lakes might be initial areas to be explored as they are subject to atmospheric conditions; they erode, are windswept and baked by the sun, they ebb and flow with the tide, shift and meander over time, freeze and thaw with the seasons, rise and fall after drought and precipitation, and as such are in flux and are difficult to pin down and fix as boundaries. On the one hand, they often serve as boundaries for political projects that imagine communities separated by ‘natural’ divisions. On the other hand, they are fluid geographies, forever eroding, floating, or flowing signalling a world of mobilities and instabilities (Steinberg and Peters, 2015). Yet all borders are elemental human-nonhuman spaces and engaging with the elements enables a renewed geographical discussion of the ambiguous horizontal boundaries of states and the indefinite vertical boundaries of water, land, and sky (Squire, 2016). This paper session comprises a vision for what elemental borderscapes are while at the same time producing elemental more-than-human stories about encounters with everyday borderscapes where borders operate as a zone of exception and as a social practice and discourse (Paasi, 1999).

We invite papers on the materialities and politics of elemental borderscapes and encounters with them. We welcome diverse approaches to and conceptualisations of an elemental borderscape and we particularly welcome papers from regions beyond north America and Europe. We also invite papers from both political and cultural geography and creative interventions at borders as well as theoretical, descriptive, and ethnographic accounts of borderscapes. Possible themes for papers might include but are not limited to:

• The contested nature of elemental borderscapes in relation to migration, asylum, and refugee geographies, and the difficult journeys made to traverse rivers, seas, and mountains
• The materiality of an ever shifting elemental border and conversely the fixity of the representation of that border
• Geopolitical (mis)readings and storytelling of border materiality
• Ethnographic stories of borders and their cultural histories and geographies
• Historically contested borders and their relationship with local conflicts
• The theorisation of water borders using wet ontologies and the more-than-wet
• The theorisation of elemental borders as more-than-human
• Bodies of water: bodily encounters with water borders
• Creative engagements with borders: representing the border

Please email an abstract of up to 250 words (plus your name and affiliation) to james.riding@ncl.ac.uk and dahlmac@miamioh.edu by Friday, February 26, 2021. (A decision will be made on in-person elements of the RGS-IBG 2021 annual conference in early April).

Further information about the RGS-IBG 2021 conference can be found here: Royal Geographical Society – Annual International Conference (rgs.org)

References 

Engelmann, S. and McCormack, D. 2018. Elemental aesthetics: On artistic experiments with solar energy. Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 108(1), 241-259.

Paasi, A. 1999. Boundaries as social practice and discourse: The Finnish-Russian border. Regional Studies 33(7): 669–680.

Perec, G. 2008. Species of spaces and other pieces. London: Penguin.

Riding, J. and Dahlman, C. 2021. Montage space: Borderlands, micronations, terra nullius, and the imperialism of the geographical imagination. Dialogues in Human Geography e-pub ahead of print.

Squire, R. 2016. Rock, water, air and fire: Foregrounding the elements in the Gibraltar-Spain dispute. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 34(3): 545–563.

Steinberg, P.E and Peters, K. 2015. Wet ontologies, fluid spaces: Giving depth to volume through oceanic thinking. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 33(2): 247–264.

Wilson, H.F. 2017. On geography and encounter: Bodies, borders, and difference. Progress in Human Geography, 41(4), 451-471.

The following is a statement from the Board of the Political Geography Specialty Group on the anti-racism protests taking place across the US and the world:

Like many throughout the world, we are appalled and saddened by the murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, and countless other Black Americans. Their deaths reflect the persistence of anti-Black racism and white supremacy that dehumanizes people of color. The Board of the Political Geography Specialty Group condemns anti-Black racism and police violence in all its forms, in the US and elsewhere. We support the AAG’s recent statement and encourage efforts to use the critical and applied skills of political geographers to fight against systemic racial violence and inequality, and to enact systemic change. We affirm our commitment to resist and confront the devaluation and trivialization of Black lives, and stand in solidarity with Black Geographers and those fighting for racial justice and social change.

Collectively,
The Board of the Political Geography Specialty Group of the AAG

We are pleased to announce this year’s winners of Political Geography Specialty Group awards. Typically these announcements are made at the annual PGSG business meeting, which we unfortunately were not be able to hold this year. Congratulations to all of our winners

Student Awards

Political Geography Undergraduate Student Paper Award

 Sara Kaminski  James Madison University  “A Historical and Cartographic Association between the British Colonization of Burma and the Rohingya Crisis in the Modern Day Myanmar”

Graduate Student Paper Award Winners

Hilary Faxon, Cornell University “Performing Property After Authoritarian Rule”

Jonghee Lee-Caldararo, University of Kentucky “Micropolitics of sleepless in Seoul: Understanding South Korean young adults’ nighttime practices at 24-hour-cafés through Foucault’s conceptualization of governmentality”

Alexander Murphy Dissertation Enhancement Award

Jenny McGibbon Ohio State The Anti-trafficking Movement and the Impact of SESTA/FOSTA on the U.S. Sex Industry.

Non Student Awards

Stanley Brunn Young Scholar Award

Andrew Curley University of North Carolina Chapel Hill

From the nomination letter:

Andrew, though a junior scholar, is a leader in the theorization of environmental questions through the lens of Indigenous sovereignty, and I expect him to have an outsized impact on the discipline through contributions to Indigenous geographies, development geographies, and resource geographies. Sovereignty and territory are at the heart of political geography, and yet little of our work has really grappled with what sovereignty means to Indigenous scholars. This is a tremendous weakness, and one that Andrew has taken up with insight, empirical work, and compelling theoretical arguments.

Julian Minghi Distinguished Book Award

Lindsay Naylor, University of Delaware, Fair Trade Rebels Coffee Production and Struggles for Autonomy in Chiapas. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2019.

From the Nomination Letter:

This book provides an empirically grounded analysis of the diverse economic and agricultural practices of indigenous coffee producers in resistance as they play out in self-declared autonomous communities in highland Chiapas; such practices are enacted as a struggle for dignified livelihoods. Fair Trade Rebels draws on stories and experiences coming from the highlands based in interaction with the fair trade certified marketplace and state violence. In five substantive chapters, this book covers the racialized and historical underpinnings of coffee production and rebel autonomy in the highlands of Chiapas, deconstructs development and common binaries associated with fair trade certification, considers the possibilities of being in common, and evaluates actually existing food sovereignty and diverse economic exchanges.

The University of Minnesota Press has made the first chapter of this book available. It can be found here: https://manifold.umn.edu/projects/fair-trade-rebels

Virginie Mamadouh Outstanding Research Award

Kate Coddington University at Albany, State University of New York

The slow violence of life without cash: borders, state restrictions, and exclusion in the U.K. and Australia. Geographical Review. 109 (4): 527-543.

The Geographical Review has generously opened access to this article in celebration of this award. It can be found here: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1111/gere.12332

Richard Morrill Public Outreach Award

Austin Kocher, Transactional Research Access Clearinghouse, Syracuse University

From the nomination letter

Dr. Austin Kocher is currently a faculty fellow at the Transactional Research Access Clearinghouse (TRAC) at Syracuse University. He graduated from the Ohio State University in 2017 with a PhD in Geography. Trained as a legal and political geographer, his research focuses on the intersection of law, space, and immigration. While attending the Ohio State, Austin co-founded the Central Ohio Worker Center (COWC), an NGO which advocates with and for workers and immigrants in Central Ohio, combating wage theft, defending immigrants at risk of deportation, and educating workers to the benefits of collective action. Austin worked with the COWC for five years, and in his own words “We created the COWC to fill the heartbreaking lack of advocacy and organizing with undocumented immigrants and un-unionized workers living in Columbus. As a team, we worked hard to stop deportations, return stolen wages to workers, and build a viable organization.” […] Austin’s current work at TRAC is published in numerous major news outlets (such as the WSJ, NYT, the Hill, and CBS News), educating the public on the reality of immigration patterns, the asylum process, and deportation. In addition to a robust scholarly publication record, Austin frequently publishes articles and op-eds for non-academic outlets on a number of topics, from immigration to non-violence in the era of Trump.

Despite the PGSG Pre-conference’s cancellation due to Covid19, the PGSG created a way for those wishing to still share their research with others. We have a new YouTube channel where we will post videos made by members sharing their research!

Those desiring to participate should contact Samuel Nielson, the PGSG’s Graduate Student Representative, via email for details. His email address is snielson[at]email.sc.edu.

We look forward to your videos!