Title: Warfare and the Built Environment

Session ID: 6950

 Description: The study of warfare and the built environment entails multidisciplinary research and analysis of not only military strategy and tactics, but also of cityscapes and the people who inhabit them.  It weaves together the interplay between dominant groups and marginalized populations in a built environment (from city blocks or neighborhood district to an entire urban setting) with the ability to access resources (housing, clean water, and electricity).  It links urban design—existing infrastructure and the buildings themselves—to military engagement.  This session will examine warfare in a variety of built environments and in a variety of geographical, political, military, and social contexts.

 Anticipated Attendance: 50

Organizer: Jean Palmer-Moloney

Sponsorship: This session is being co-sponsored by the Military Geography and the Political Geography Specialty Groups.

Call for Papers

AAG Annual Meeting, March 2009

Las Vegas

 Negotiating Belonging: Integration, Separation, and Othering in Contemporary Europe

 Organized by David Jansson (Uppsala University) and Micheline van Riemsdijk (University of Tennessee)

 At a time when ever more countries from the East seek to join the EU, the unity of Europe as a whole and of individual member states is being challenged in a variety of ways. Some groups question whether they need their "host" states when they see the possibility of direct membership in the EU through secession. For instance, does Scotland belong more to (and in) the UK or the EU? Immigration from outside Europe challenges essentialist conceptualizations of national identity and reveals that racism still exists in European societies.  Moreover, internal migration within the EU, largely from east to west, presents similar challenges to member states in terms of determining who belongs in a destination state. The issue of belonging will remain central at the local, national and European scales as EU expansion proceeds and migration streams intensify in response to economic needs.

 This session seeks to explore questions about belonging in Europe from various perspectives. We are interested in papers that explore for example, the importance of religion, language, nationality, race/ethnicity, gender, culture, and space in determining who belongs where, and why, within Europe.

 If you are interested in participating in this session, please send an abstract to the organizers by October 12.

 Organizers:

 Dave Jansson, Uppsala University (dj28@cornell.edu)

Micheline van Riemsdijk, University of Tennessee (vanriems@utk.edu)

Local Government Boundary Change

This session is interested in examining the spatial implications and theoretical challenges confronting local government boundary change.  Local government boundary change can take the form of annexation, consolidation/merger, secession, the formation of special districts, and incorporation.  Each of these types of boundary change can have dramatic impacts on the urban and political geography of cities regarding tax rates, land use patterns, school districts, and the provision of municipal services.  Additionally, boundary change can contribute to the balkanization of metropolitan regions through incorporations, secessions, and the formation of special districts or unify urban landscapes through annexations and consolidations/mergers.  Surprisingly, boundary change as an area of research has historically been somewhat overlooked by geographers.  However, this session will focus attention on boundary change as a legitimate area of research and provide needed discourse on current research endeavors in the field. 

Russell M. Smith, Ph.D.

Winston-Salem State University

email: smithrm@wssu.edu

Re-scaling the National: The transformation of immigration policies in the US and Europe

Session Organizers:

Tatiana Matejskova, University of Minnesota

Kyle Walker, University of Minnesota

Sponsorship sought: Population Specialty Group, Political Geography Specialty Group

The political landscape of immigration in the major destination countries of the Global North has been undergoing substantial transformations in recent years, characterized strongly by a rise of anti-immigration discourses and policies. These transformations, however, are frequently taking place at scales other than that of the nation-state. Scholars have at once observed an “unprecedented” devolution of immigration responsibilities to sub-national scales on the one hand, and an extension of immigration enforcement and governance beyond national borders on the other (Coleman 2007, Varsanyi 2008, Guiraudon 2001, Faist 2007). In the United States such transformations are evinced through the proliferation of interior immigration policing and the adoption of both exclusionary and pro-immigration policies by an increasing number of localities. In the EU, immigration border control is becoming externalized through agreements with a number of North African countries. In respect to immigrant incorporation policies, national ‘integration’ discourses are being increasingly shaped by the EU. In this session we ask in which ways these discourses and policies operating at scales below or beyond the nation-state mesh with and rework those promulgated at the national scale. In which ways do they congeal in particular geographical contexts? We are interested in empirically-based and theoretically sound papers that examine this varied scalar nature of current re-articulations of immigration and immigrant incorporation policies in the Global North.

We welcome papers that include (but are not limited to) the following issues:

• local immigration ordinances and their imaginaries of national and local communities
• tensions between local and national integration discourses and practices
• the impact of increased policing and immigration law enforcement on migrant communities
• externalization and fortification of border control and its impact on local politics of belonging
• the role of the nation-state in supra-national migration policy frameworks
• local resistance towards the enforcement of federal immigration law
• regional variations in the scalar restructuring of immigration policies

Locating the Prison: Geographies of Crime and Punishment

Annual Conference of the AAG, Las Vegas, Nevada, March 22-27, 2009

Organizers: Matt Mitchelson, University of Georgia & Anne Bonds, University of Wisonsin-Milwaukee

Sponsored by: the Ethics, Justice, and Human Rights Specialty Group, and the Political Geography Specialty Group

Rather than reifying the prison as a severed and totalizing spatial disjuncture, this research paper session aims to emphasize the connections and interdependencies that constitute prisons’ spatiality. Contrary to powerful geographic images of confinement and restraint, prisons are actually host to remarkable circulatory processes. Bodies, identities, capital, narcotics, and myriad forms of violence often permeate ‘the criminal justice system’ itself, meanwhile going to (and coming from) the broader contexts in which this system is embedded. A small, but growing, number of geographers have begun the process of tracing these processes and their attendant spatialities. In the spirit of this work, we intend this session as a series of presentations through which to explore imprisonment as a fundamentally spatial project and process. We welcome scholars across methodological and research traditions, and particularly encourage young scholars to submit abstracts for consideration.

Possible themes encouraged for submission include: the rise to mass imprisonment; the political-economy of prison siting; prisoner transportation; rural and urban interconnections; interrogations of so-called “collateral consequences” associated with imprisonment; recidivism; prison privatization; impediments to reentry (e.g., legal barriers to public assistance or food stamps); felony disenfranchisement; the prison-industrial complex; and the so-called ‘War on Drugs’. These themes are only intended as a starting point, and other related themes are welcomed equally.

If interested, please submit an abstract for consideration (following standard AAG submission guidelines) to Matt Mitchelson at mmitchel@uga.edu by no later than October 10, 2008. Meantime, feel free to contact myself or Anne Bonds (bondsa@uwm.edu) with any questions or for more details.

Panel session title: Nationalism in the classroom: experiences,
challenges and ways forward

Organized panel session for the 2009 Annual Meeting of the Association of American Geographers, Las Vegas, NV

Organizers: Kolson Schlosser, Western Kentucky University and Anu
Sabhlok, University of Louisville

Sponsored by Geographic Education Specialty Group and Political Geography Specialty Group

Description: Teaching political geography always presents challenges in these politically charged times, but this is particularly the case when it comes to teaching about nationalism. Nationalism is an important component of human geography classrooms, but by its very nature nationalism raises a number of very specific pedagogical issues. It is, for example, a thin line between teaching critical thinking and making problematic false consciousness assumptions about students, and this is arguably at the core of why nationalism is such a contentious topic. Many of these issues are amplified by increasing attention to issues of academic freedom. Plenty of related issues present themselves as well, such as creating a comfortable environment for international students to discuss their own sense of national identity. This panel session brings together educators and scholars with experience negotiating these and related obstacles to share their experiences, and to discuss what pedagogic and geographic theory can tell us about how best to approach nationalism as a classroom topic. This session therefore aims to provide a forum for sharing ideas about how to teach about nationalism in the classroom and how to deal with the inherent difficulties involved.

We are looking for 2-3 more panelists to round out a full panel. Panelists should have experience, in some form, teaching nationalism (or related topics) in the classroom (research experience on nationalism is helpful but not required). Please contact kolson.schlosser@wku.edu if interested.

Spatializing State Theory

Annual Conference of the AAG, Las Vegas, Nevada, March 22-27, 2009

Organizers: Matt Mitchelson, University of Georgia & Stijn Oosterlynck, K.U. Leuven ( Belgium)

“The state is therefore by no means a power imposed on society from without” (Engels [1884] 1986, p. 208).

 Geographers have recently explored the changing spatiality of statehood in response to globalisation and the crisis of the national state space (Brenner, 2004, Brenner et al., 2003, Jones, 1997). Their analysis of the ‘relocation’ of the processes of statehood has stimulated a flurry of empirical research and theoretical contributions. However, these popular accounts of the rescaling of state space have been criticised on two accounts. Firstly, some have argued that current accounts of state spatial restructuring are overly structuralist and stylised and that they reduce the regulatory problems which state rescaling addresses to those emerging directly from the processes of accumulation (Hay, 2004, Le Galès, 2006). Not enough attention is paid to political agency and struggle, to the manifold sources of social antagonisms of which it springs and to the empirical complexity this brings to state spatial restructuring. Secondly, others have criticised these accounts for the presumed ontological priority they give to scale as the dominant socio-spatial principle structuring the state’s spatiality (Marston et al., 2005).

They propose to abandon the hierarchical notions implicit in scalar thinking and suggest a flat ontology of temporary ‘sites’ composed by ‘localized and non-localized event relations’.

This panel session is conceived as a means of addressing these issues. If spatial strategies and projects of statehood are generative of new state spaces, where are these strategies and projects located? By which kind of actors are they pursued? What are their geographical bases of action and support? Which kind of social contradictions are they addressing and/or embodying? What kind of spatialities are mobilised in these spatial strategies or in resistance to it? How can we conceive state spatial restructuring through the prism of sites and event-relations? How can the latter be articulated with scale-based approaches?

Individual remarks (5-10 minutes per panelist) will be followed by direct interaction between panelists and attendees. Possible subjects encouraged for submission include: neoliberal governance; ‘Marxist’ theories of the state; theorizations of scale; theories and practices of resistance; and the ethical implications of ontological statements . These subjects are only intended as possible starting points. Other subjects, related to the two central themes of political struggle and the spatiality of state theory are welcomed and encouraged.

If interested, please submit an abstract for consideration (following standard AAG submission guidelines) to Matt Mitchelson at mmitchel@uga.edu and Stijn Oosterlynck at Stijn.Oosterlynck@asro.kuleuven.be no later than October 9, 2008. Although this is not a research paper session, the abstract should clearly articulate your intended individual contribution to the conversation. Meantime, feel free to contact us with any questions or for more details.

Annual Meeting of the Association of American Geographers

Las Vegas, NV March 22-27, 2009

Call for Papers & Panelists

War, the iconic form of state violence, is frequently understood as an exceptional occurrence in distinction to the norm of peace.  This dualism works to obscure everyday state and structural violence, and hence hides the politics of organizing societies for violence and naturalizes the violent means through which social hierarchies are constructed and maintained.  A broad range of scholarship, including feminist, antiracist, anarchist, and pacifist, and activism has theorized and organized around continuities of violence. 

Drawing on these diverse insights, in this paper(s) session and panel discussion we seek to focus on continuities of state violence.  What are the ways in which we can conceptualize prisons, jails, policing, detention centers, border walls, and coercive health and welfare policies in relation to militarization?  What are the everyday geographies of state violence, how are these sites connected and different, and finally, how are these violent geographies naturalized and legitimated?  How are people organizing to demilitarize (the spaces of) their everyday lives?  How might thinking about landscapes of violence – in terms of materiality and representation – enable coalitions and solidarities to construct just, peaceful landscapes?  We call for papers and panelists working on these questions from a range of theoretical perspectives, sites, and times. 

Political Geographies of the American South

Co-Organizers: Jonathan Leib, Old Dominion University
Thomas Chapman, Georgia Southern University

Co-Sponsors: Study of the American South Specialty Group
Political Geography Specialty Group

We are seeking papers for sessions that promote the study of the social, political, cultural, and economic aspects of the American South. We envision this call broadly, to include a range of topics that provide critical reflection on the issues, processes, intrinsic qualities, and interconnections that shape the American South and its landscapes. Examples of research consist of a range of themes that incorporate (but are not limited to) electoral studies within the region, the American South’s political economy, public policy issues, social justice studies, and geographies of identity, public memory and landscape. We would also welcome inquiries from anyone wishing to act as a chair or discussant in a session.

To present a paper you must do the following before October 16, 2008:

1. Compose an abstract following the AAG guidelines

2. Register online with the AAG to obtain a personal ID number

3. Email Presenter Identification Number (PIN) and abstract before October 16, 2008 to Jonathan Leib (jleib@odu.edu).

For further information please contact:

Jonathan Leib (jleib@odu.edu)
Thomas Chapman (tchapman@georgiasouthern.edu)

Organizers: Kevin Ward (Geography, School of Environment and Development,
University of Manchester, UK) and David Wilson (Geography, University of
Illinois at Urbana-Champaign)

Over the last thirty years fringe and shadow economies have grown rapidly
in some of the poorest urban neighbourhoods of the industrialized world. A
stroll around many of the US's and the UK's inner cities reveals a
proliferation of its leading edges -- check cashers, pawnbrokers, payday
lenders, rent-to-own stores, social service organisations, and temp
staffing companies -- acting as 'boundary institutions' to financial and
labour markets. They now dominate these urban landscapes as they produce
spaces of predation, offering shoddy and overpriced goods and services,
trapping workers in low-pay jobs, and exacerbating poverty and deprivation
of struggling people. As a subset of neo-liberal economies, they are now
generally sanctioned and accepted amalgams that are bolstered by prevailing
norms, values, sentiments, and legal codes. In this context, they
constitute an institutional infrastructure that shapes the way in which
contemporary urban landscapes of dystopia and exclusion come to exist in
the way that they do. The firms in these industries have served to enforce
and deepen the systemically uneven features of capitalism while they have
experienced high rates of growth that has allowed them to open new stores
in more and more low-income communities. Yet, despite their presence in
the life of a growing number of citizens very little is known about them.
This session welcomes papers that contribute to a fuller understanding of
these issues.

Authors are invited to submit a brief abstract (not more than 250 words) to
the session organizers Kevin Ward
(<mailto:Kevin.ward@manchester.ac.uk>Kevin.ward@manchester.ac.uk) and David
Wilson (<mailto:dwilson2@uiuc.edu>dwilson2@uiuc.edu) by Friday October 3rd
at the latest.

Call for Papers

Association of American Geographers Annual Meeting

Las Vegas, NV

Last Day for Session Registration: October 16, 2008

Please note that sessions will likely fill earlier than the final deadline.

Geographies of Media

Co-Sponsored by the Political Geography Specialty Group, the Cultural Geography Specialty Group, the Critical Geography Specialty Group, the Communication Geography Specialty Group and Aether: The Journal of Media Geography

We are seeking papers that examine geographies of the various forms of media, including cinema, television, the Internet, music, art, advertising, newspapers and magazines, video and animation etc.  These sessions should include contributions to current issues surrounding these media, beginning with constructions of space & place, cultural, society, and identity.

We are hoping to present a wide range of both topic and context and seek participants interested in the geographical implications - social, political, cultural, and economic - that are often contained within the spaces and places of different forms of media. Media extend beyond their original form and so papers should also envision these geographies as part of a broader industrial and political complex in which culture is an economic commodity set within the broader frame of a global and postmodern era, and with the links between these realms and our daily lived experiences, from our cities to streets to living rooms to imaginations. These contexts invite inquiries into the production, distribution, exhibition, and consumption of all types of media and we encourage critical, pedagogical and discursive contributions. We would also welcome inquiries from anyone wishing to act as a discussant in a session. 

This year includes a special session on the representation of place in Latin American film and a $100 award from Aether for the best presentation given in any of the Media Geography sessions

To present a paper you must do the following before October 16, 2008:

1. Compose an abstract following the AAG guidelines

2.  Register online with the AAG to obtain a personal ID number

3.  Email Presenter Identification Number (PIN) and abstract before October 16, 2008 to Jim Craine <jwc53531@csun.edu>

For further information please contact:

• Jim Craine <jwc53531@csun.edu>
• Chris Lukinbeal <christopher.lukinbeal@asu.edu>
• Jason Dittmer <j.dittmer@ucl.ac.uk>

‘Educating the cosmopolitan national: Negotiating memory and conflict in making democratic citizens’ at the American Association of Geographers’ Conference 2009 (Session ID 6931). Please send expressions of interest to Dan Hammett (D. Hammett@ed.ac.uk) by 5 October 2009.

Educating the cosmopolitan national: Negotiating memory and conflict in making democratic citizens

Organizers: Lynn Staeheli (lynn.staeheli@ed.ac.uk) and Daniel Hammett (D.Hammett@ed.ac.uk).

Sponsored by the Political Geography Specialty Group

The negotiation of belonging, the designation of ‘insiders’ and ‘outsiders’, and the manipulation of citizenship and nationhood refract conflict and political struggles within states around the world. These practices emphasize the need to develop citizens who uphold ideals of democracy and nationhood, particularly in states that are negotiating histories of inequality, oppression and conflict. Education programs and policies provide one avenue through which government can directly affect citizenship formation and the development of values, skills and dispositions associated with the ‘good’ citizen. However, the pedagogy of post-conflict nations is difficult, as governments try to present narratives of national histories and character without inflaming (sometimes quite recent) conflicts. One strategy has been to promote a version of citizenship that negotiates cosmopolitan ideals and national histories.

This session will examine the ways in which states seek to negotiate tensions between cosmopolitan citizenship and national histories in citizenship education programs. It asks: How do governments and elites attempt to overcome histories of conflict in re-building nations? How are policies of nation-building and citizenship-making negotiated and transformed in their implementation? What happens when these policies seem to limit the possibilities for reconciliation by glossing over historical “truths”? What happens when national policies are deemed inappropriate to the local context in which they are implemented?

The Geographies of Education

2009 AAG Annual Meeting, Las Vegas

he importance of education in influencing the geographies of opportunity available to children is widely recognised.  However, the ways through which this occurs are complex and multi-faceted.  This series of sessions will examine the geographies of education from a variety of perspectives and using a wide array of methodologies to focus on the following themes: (1) barriers to academic achievement; (2) integration, segregation and identity in school spaces; (3) pedagogy, policy and power. 

Sessions organized by:

Valerie Ledwith, National University of Ireland, Galway.

Tricia Ruiz, University of Washington

Velna Bernelius, University of Helsinki

Proposed paper session and panel discussion.

“Anarchism, Autonomia, and the Spatiality of Revolutionary Politics and Theory”

This session sponsored by the Socialist and Critical Geography Specialty Group

Despite the fact that the first two radical geographers, Peter Kropotkin and Elisee Recluse, were also the most famous anarchists of their time, radical geography has generally had a relatively limited engagement with
anti-authoritarian radicalisms. In the past decade scholars such as Todd
May, Richard Day, and David Graeber have begun to rethink anarchism, finding strong affinities between anarchist theory and the practices and politics of emergent global social movements, as well as myriad connections between anarchism and post-structural, feminist, and queer theories. Additionally, the emergence of Italian Autonomous Marxism onto the Anglophone academic scene offers new theoretical tools for tying anti-authoritarian politics to a materialist critique of capital and the state. However radical geography, which is dominated by neo-Gramscian perspectives, has largely ignored the potential and actual contributions of anti-hegemonic radicalisms to geographic theory. Similarly, within anarchist and autonomous thought there has been a distinct lack of work that rigorously addresses the constitutive spatialities of anti-hegemonic movements and theories. We think that both anarchism and geography can benefit from a long over-due encounter, and hope that these sessions can help to bring anarchist theory and practice into renewed and sustained conversation with the mainstream of radical geography.

This is a call for papers that examine and critically interrogate the spaces, politics, and praxes of the new geographies of anarchism. We welcome theoretical or empirical engagements with anarchist, anti-authoritarian, and autonomous theory and practice.

Possible paper topics might include but are not limited to:

-Spatiality of anarchist organizing/mobilizations -Space and autonomous theory -Flat Ontologies and Anarchistic Politics -Horizontal networks vs. hierarchy -Re-examinations of anarchism and the history of radical geography -Autonomy vs Anarchy -Post-structural Anarchisms -Queer Anarchisms -Feminist and post-colonial articulations with Anarchist politics -The potential of anarchism to address multiple categories of difference and domination -Anarchism in the post-1968 world/ the crisis of the Left -Politics against sovereignty and capitalism -The relations and disjunctures between anarchism and Marxisms -Anarchism and state theory -Anarchism and the spaces of Empire/Multitude -Anarchist epistemologies/ontologies -Militant research praxis -Hegemonic versus anti-hegemonic theory in geography -Anarchism and Neoliberalism -The historic role of Anarchism in struggles against capital and the state -The theoretical openings and limitations of Anarchism in confronting capitalism as a system -Anarchism and the critique of militant particularisms -The geographies of contemporary Anarchist practices -Anarchist research methods -Diverse economies -Radical democracy and autonomy
We are also interested in constructing a panel discussion to be held immediately following the paper session(s). If you are interested in presenting a paper or participating in the panel discussion please send a title and brief abstract (as soon as possible and no later than September
20th) to Nathan Clough at clou0062@umn.edu or Renata Blumberg at blum0135@umn.edu.

Nation-building and National Identity in the FSU

Organizer: Natalie Koch, University of Colorado at Boulder

The meanings of “nationality” and “ethnicity” in the Soviet Union differ markedly from the way in which they are understood in the West and other places around the world. Rogers Brubaker (1996) suggests a fundamental tension within the Soviet nationality policies – it promoted two independent definitions of nationhood: one territorial and political, the other cultural and ethnocultural. While territorial jurisdiction was ascribed to certain nationalities, “territory” and “nation” were neither spatially, conceptually, nor legally congruent. Independence has stimulated the “nationalization” of the various successor states. This has been accomplished through various means, such as the increased “nativization” of power structures, the implementation of stringent language policies, and the emergence of racialized discourses and practices. This CFP invites submissions that seek to address the legacies of this Soviet conception of nationhood for these former Soviet states.

Possible topics could include, and are not limited to:
-a case study examining the implications of the Soviet nationalities policy -defining the “nation” and/or “ethnicity” in the post-Soviet context -the nation-building strategies of NIS successor state leaders -the role of state-scale actors in fostering a new “national” identity and its role in legitimating their rule -the role of territory and borders (as both symbols and institutions) in articulating the “nation”
-the relationship between religion and national identity in the FSU -gender and the nation/nationalist project -comparative study of FSU and another region/country -language politics -inter-ethnic violence in the FSU -xenophobia/racism in the FSU, especially in the Russian Federation -methodological approaches and challenges in studying nation-building/nationalism in the FSU

Please send related proposals to Natalie Koch <mailto:Natalie.Koch@colorado.edu> by October 10th, 2008. Include title, abstract (under 250 words), and PIN number.

AAG 2009 Paper/Panel Session Proposal

Organizers: Clive Barnett, Allan Cochrane, Scott Rodgers

Where is urban politics?

The urban is often seen as a place of and for politics. It is where the multiple connections and circulations of the world – of people, organizations, infrastructures, built form, events, and more – come together into particular intensities. The urban is widely understood as a distinctive generative force for, or object of, certain political practices, desires, strategies, groups, and institutions. Just what makes the sorts of politics routinely researched as urban politics ‘urban’, however, is far from straightforward. Does urban politics revolve around distinctively urban objects of contention – housing, transport, and other built infrastructures? Is urban politics constituted functionally, in relation for example to the spatial configuration of the means of social reproduction? Is urban politics defined by distinctively urban processes of political subject-formation? Does urban politics refer to particular agents of political authority? Is urban politics generated by the distinctive political rationalities of urban modernity? Or, is urban politics just the politics that happens in urban locations?

This session seeks to reconsider the simple question that makes for so many answers: how do we know when a political practice is meaningfully described as urban? The standard approach to this issue is to make claims about the ontological status of the urban as some kind of spatial object: scalar, or networked, or material, or assembled. The focus of this session, by contrast, is the forms of politics through which the urban emerges as politically problematic, implicitly or explicitly. It seeks to bring together contributions which consider two related questions: i) what sorts of politics are explicitly coded as urban or city-based, in variable historical and geographical contexts? ii) what is at stake in academic re-descriptions of political processes as ‘urban’? In both cases, we seek to generate reflection on the values at stake when political processes are framed through the urban lens.

We envisage convening 2/3 paper sessions and a panel session to round off and reflect on emerging themes. Expressions of interest, including an abstract of no more that 250 words, should be sent to Scott Rodgers [s.rodgers@open.ac.uk], Clive Barnett [c.barnett@open.ac.uk], and Allan Cochrane [a.d.cochrane@open.ac.uk] by October 9 th.

Further details on paper requirements and registration for the AAG meeting can be found at <http://www.aag.org/annualmeetings/2009/index.htm>