Please remember that the deadline for the PGSG Undergraduate Student Paper Award is coming up very soon – June 15. You will find all the details here:
https://www.politicalgeography.org/awards/student-awards/

Congratulations to all the 2015 PGSG award winners. We are pleased to announce the following recipients:

Grad student paper awards:
1. PhD Student Paper: Emma Mullaney, Penn State University for ”Geopolitical Maize: Peasant Seeds, Everyday Practices, and Food Security in Mexico” (honorable mention is Katherine Sammler)
2. MA: Kelsey Carlson, Syracuse University for “Drawing Borders to Dispossess and Placing Dakota People in the Present: Alternative Territoriality”

Alexander B. Murphy Dissertation Enhancement Award:
Keegan Williams, Wilfrid Laurier University for “Arriving Somewhere but not Here: Exploring and Mapping the Relationship between Border Enforcement and Migration by Boat in the Central Mediterranean Sea, 2006-2014”

Student Travel awards:
1. Ali Nehme Hamdan, UCLA
2. Genevieve Parente, UBC
3. Wes Attewell, UBC
4. Joshua Watkins, UC Davis

Non-student awards:
1. Stanley D. Brunn Young Scholar Award: Simon Springer, U of Victoria
2. Richard Morrill Public Outreach Award: Martin Müller, U of Zurich
3. Julian Minghi Outstanding Book Award: Emma Norman, Northwest Indian College for Governing Transboundary Waters: Canada, the United States and Indigenous Communities (Routledge 2014)
4. Virginie Mamadouh Outstanding Research Award: Sarah Mills, Loughborough University for ‘An instruction in good citizenship’: scouting and the historical geographies of citizenship education (Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 2013)

A quick reminder to everyone at AAG in Chicago — please join us for the PGSG Business Meeting:

Thursday, April 23 at 11:50 am in Columbus CD (Hyatt, East Tower, Gold Level)

Mark your calendars : PGSG will be sponsoring a current events roundtable about the recent protests in Hong Kong!

The Occupy Central/Umbrella Movement in Hong Kong (Panel 3675, Session 23813)

TIME/PLACE: Thursday, April 23, 5:20 PM – 7:00 PM, Lucerne 3, Swissôtel, Lucerne Level

ORGANIZERS: George C. S. Lin (University of Hong Kong) and Alexander B. Murphy (University of Oregon)

CHAIR: Alexander B. Murphy

PANELISTS:
Yue-Man Yeung (Chinese University of Hong Kong)
Cindy Fan (University of California, Los Angeles)
Roger Chan (University of Hong Kong)
Wing Shing Tang (Hong Kong Baptist University)
George C. S. Lin (University of Hong Kong)

This session focuses on Hong Kong’s uneasy current status in the face of the much publicized Occupy Central/Umbrella Movement protests that rocked the city in recent months.  Why did the protests emerge and what do they portend for Hong Kong’s future?  What can they tell us about the issues and challenges facing a rising and increasingly assertive China?  How can geographers and other social scientists contribute to understanding Hong Kong’s changing socio-political environment?   These and related questions will be explored by a group of geographers who have lived in and studied one of Asia’s most dynamic, important cities.

The PGSG 28th Annual Preconference schedule is now posted here. It is preliminary, so please review it now and let us know if you have any change of plans.

You will find more details about the conference venue, etc. here.

PGSG & DePaul Geography look forward to seeing you all in April!

AAG CFP: Geographies of Citizenship and Dissent

This is an interactive paper session designed to encourage discussion and dialogue around how citizenship and dissent plays out in and between a diverse array of material and mediated spaces: from traditional public squares, to social media platforms, to commercial centers or workplaces.

Potential issues may include:

• Occupy/ Culture Jamming
• Ferguson/ Policing/ Riots
• Squatting
• Surveillance
• E-Graffiti/Hacktivism
• Social Movements
• Border Militia

Session will be sponsored by the Cultural Geography and Communications Geography specialty groups.

If interested, please contact Bruce D’Arcus (darcusb@miamioh.edu).

Annual Meeting of the AAG, April 21-25, 2015, Chicago, IL

CFP: Everyday geographies of global, urban infrastructures of energy
Session Organizers: Jonathan Silver (Durham University), Anthony Levenda (Portland State University)

Energy forms a crucial support system for the everyday reproduction of urban life in all its forms (Gandy 2005; Swyngedouw 2006). The planetary scale infrastructures that produce and distribute energy for towns and cities are actively being reconfigured across various geographies in response to a range of ongoing global-local pressures, processes and imperatives (Swyngedouw 1997) including climate change and low carbon agendas (Bulkeley & Newell 2010; Hodson & Marvin 2010), securitization (Graham 2010), financial crisis and ongoing forms of political contestation (McFarlane & Rutherford 2008). Such material transformations are shaping new geographies both within and beyond urban regions (Graham & Marvin 2001) that suggest new considerations about politics, inequality and everyday life across energy infrastructures.

This session is interested in the everyday geographies of planetary (urban) infrastructures of energy relating to extraction, distribution, supply and consumption. Such geographies suggest the need to pay close attention to the ways in which these global, urban infrastructures of energy are shifted and intervened across by various social interests (Hughes 1983).  This call for papers seeks contributions from scholars interested in these everyday transformations of energy infrastructures from a micro scale setting of the household through to the vast pipelines that transport oil across politicized landscapes. We invite papers focused both on the global North and South, or sensitive comparative analyses (Ward 2008; Robinson 2011), including topics such as:

• The daily operations of planetary scale infrastructures
• Geographies of informality and incrementalism
• The struggles around energy poverty, precarity, and security
• The politics of knowledge and energy technology in everyday settings
• Contestations and resistances across various forms of energy infrastructure

Please submit abstracts of no more than 300 words by email to both anthonylevenda@pdx.edu and j.d.silver@durham.ac.uk by November 3rd. Notifications of inclusion in the session will be made by November 5th.

References
Bulkeley, H., & Newell, P. (2010). Governing climate change. Routledge.
Gandy, M. (2005) Cyborg Urbanization; Complexity and Monstrosity in the Contemporary City in International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 29 (1) 26-49
Graham, S. (2010). Cities Under Siege: The New Military Urbanism. London: Verso.
Graham, S., and Marvin, S. (2001). Splintered Urbanism. New York: Routledge.
Hodson, M., and Marvin, S. (2010). World Cities and Climate Change. Milton Keynes:Open University Press.
Hughes, T. (1983) Networks of Power: Electrification in Western Society, 1880‐1930. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
McFarlane, C., and Rutherford, J. (2008) ‘Political infrastructures: Governing and experiencing the fabric of the city’. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 32(2), pp363–74.
Robinson, J. (2011) Cities in a world of cities. The comparative gesture. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research. Vol 25, pp1-11.
Swyngedouw, E. (1997) ‘Neither Global nor Local: Glocalization’ and the Politics of Scale’, in Cox, K. (1997) (ed.) Spaces of Globalization. New York: Guilford Press, pp137–66.
Swyngedouw, E. (2006) ‘Circulations and Metabolisms: (Hybrid) Natures and (Cyborg) Cities’, Science and Culture, 15 (2), pp105-121.
Ward, K. (2008) Towards a comparative (re)turn in urban studies? Some reflections. Urban Geography, 29, pp405-410.

Urbanization on the Chinese Frontier: The Political Stakes of “Progress”

AAG CFP: Chicago 2015
In China’s national minority populated frontier regions, development in general, and urbanization in particular, is often viewed through one of two lenses: positively, as a process that allows for material and social development that contributes to increasing living standards and opportunities; or cynically, as a calculated state strategy to weaken ethno-national identities, spread contemporary Han culture to minority regions, and lock minorities into an urban world that structurally disadvantages them. Paradoxically, the city potentially could allow for any and all of these possibilities.

Because the city invokes such a complex web of factors potentially positive and negative, it is apt to ask what is at stake in frontier urbanization: On whose terms is urbanization enacted? What does it mean to benefit from urbanization? Will urbanization really bring the homogenization both desired and feared by different stakeholders?

This paper panel seeks to analyze these questions and their greater social, political, and geo-political repercussions in China’s urbanizing border regions.

I am hoping to draw together perspectives based around different theoretical and methodological approaches, for instance but not limited to:
·      Cross-ethnic research
·      Studies on migrants
·      Ethnographic research
·      Demographic analysis
·      Discourse analysis
·      Household or workplace surveys
·      Theoretical problems of studying the Chinese city
·      Theory concerning minority affairs and classification

Please send paper abstracts to Andrew Grant at angrant@ucla.edu through October 31st.

CFP AAG 2015, Chicago, IL, April 21-25

Articulating discourse analysis in geography: method, practice and process
Organizers: Chad Steacy, Dept. of Geography, University of Georgia
Christian Pettersen, Dept. of Geography, University of Georgia

Discourse analysis has achieved mainstream acceptance in geographic research (Waitt 2010).   Over the past two decades, it has proved itself a powerful and versatile research tool, informing a diverse body of study, from Tim Cresswell’s (1992) early reevaluation of urban graffiti narratives to Steven Pile’s (2005) psychoanalytically-informed exhibition of urban fantasy ‘dream-work’.  Beyond a mere variety of subject matter, discourse analysis has additionally informed work spanning wide theoretical breadth, from realist-oriented ideology critique (i.e. Linnros & Hallin 2001) to the radical (de)constructionism of post-structural genealogy (as performed by Cooke & Jenkins 2001).

But despite its popularity and adaptability, discourse analysis is too often left underexplored, under-theorized as method and under-elaborated as practice (Antaki, C. et al. 2003; Lees 2004).  It is quite common for articles using discourse analysis as their primary methodology to leave their ‘findings’ to speak for themselves, as though the mechanics of analysis and the theoretical challenges that arise are extraneous to – or in any case implicitly expressed within – the research results.

This session endeavors to open the ‘black box’ and articulate discourse analysis by way of case-study or through direct theoretical consideration of discourse analysis as method, practice, and/or process.  Distinctively qualitative perspectives are preferred.

Please send statements of interest or titles and abstracts to Chad Steacy at steacy@uga.edu and/or Christian Pettersen at cpetters@uga.edu by November 1.

CFP: Geographies of Citizenship and Dissent

This is an interactive paper session designed to encourage discussion and dialogue around how citizenship and dissent plays out in and between a diverse array of material and mediated spaces: from traditional public squares, to social media platforms, to commercial centers or workplaces.

Potential issues may include:

• Occupy/ Culture Jamming
• Ferguson/ Policing/ Riots
• Squatting
• Surveillance
• E-Graffiti/Hacktivism
• Social Movements
• Border Militia

Session will be sponsored by the Cultural Geography and Communications Geography specialty groups.

If interested, please contact Bruce D’Arcus (darcusb@miamioh.edu) by October 24 (though obviously, the sooner the better!).