American Association of Geographers – Call for Papers

After these god-awful, life-stopping exams, I have to get down to several pending journal articles. One of them is for an Australian-based journal called Still. There are several AAG Call for Papers that seem to go with the topic and other half-completed works, so I may attend AAG in Las Vegas again next year.

Q: What kind of potential and current law school students will you find at the American Association of Geographers?

A: The ones doing Marine and Navigation Law

Ok, I admit, that was a bad one.

Waiting

Call for Papers for the 2009 Association of American Geographers Annual
Meeting, March 22-27, Las Vegas

Organizers:

Craig Jeffrey, University of Washington
Geraldine Pratt, University of British Columbia

We all wait. As Henri Lefebvre argued, waiting is a prominent feature of modern everyday life. In the second half of the twentieth century, in particular, the increasing regimentation and bureaucratization of time in the West, combined with the growing reach of the state created multiple settings – such as bus stands, clinics and offices – in which people were compelled to wait (Moran 2008). Papers in this proposed session might examine these everyday spaces of waiting, including the politics that emerges in places such as the queue (Corbridge 2003). We are also interested in papers that consider the apparent proliferation of contexts in which
people wait for years or whole lifetimes. Of course, there is nothing new about prolonged waiting. But Bayart (2007) has persuasively argued that varied populations are increasingly being forced to live in limbo. Papers in this session might discuss elite, subaltern or middle class experiences of chronic waiting; the causes of prolonged waiting; pathways out of limbo; vernacular conceptualizations of waiting; and spatialized cultural, social and political projects that emerge within communities in wait.

These foci should not be seen as restrictive, and we welcome papers from scholars who approach waiting from other perspectives and contributions from people who had not previously thought of their research in terms of waiting but who are interested in shared discussion around this idea. For example, papers might also investigate how waiting might be theorized within geography and related disciplines (e.g. Bissell 2007), the limits of waiting
as a basis for reflecting on politics and subjectivity formation, historical geographies of waiting, waiting as a methodology, architectures of waiting, or waiting and academic professional practice (Bourdieu 2000).

Please send a title and if possible also a short abstract to Craig Jeffrey at cjj3@u.washington.edu by October 4th if you are interested in this topic,
and please forward this message to others who might be interested.

Dr. Craig Jeffrey
Associate Professor in Geography and International Studies
University of Washington
Department of Geography Box 353550
Seattle, WA 98195
USA

11.8 million and waiting, confined in a certain space and territory.

And then there is a fascinating one on Foucault and space, based around his recently released lecture series.

CFP: Securing the future: the role of space in impending crises.  AAG Las
Vegas, March 22-7, 2009

Please send abstracts to Bethan Evans (b.evans@mmu.ac.uk) by Friday 10th
October (deadline for registration with the AAG is 16th October)

There has been a noticeable shift in public policy across a range of sectors from policy focussed on individual (or corporate) responsibility to a focus on the ‘environment’ (imagined in various guises) as the cause of, and potential solution to a range of social ills (e.g. obesity, drinking, crime, terrorism, climate change, etc). Often focussed on (though not restricted
to) the ‘urban’, such policy uses a range of terms (space, environment, context, etc.) to refer to the combination of spatial relations (social, cultural, physical, political, economic etc.) deemed responsible for impending crises.  Similar to Foucault’s (2007) use of the term ‘Milieu’, such ‘environments’ are seen as spaces of intervention and hence as spaces of security as environments and populations are seen as mutually constitutive (population understood as a multiplicity bound to the material relations within which they live).

Thus, according to Foucault, using the example of the construction or planning of towns as a form of social control, security can be differentiated from discipline through its particular relationship with both space and time: “Security will rely on a number of material givens.  It
will, of course, work on site with the flows of water, islands, air and so forth.  Thus it works on a given…[which] will not be reconstructed to arrive at a point of perfection, as in a disciplinary town. … The town will not be conceived or planned according to a static perception, but will open onto a future that is not exactly controllable. … The specific space of security
refers then to a series of possible events; it refers to the temporal and the uncertain, which have to be inserted into a given space” (2007 p.19-20).

Across the social sciences a range of work has also noted a fundamental shift in the orientation to the future within recent policy (to pre-emption and anticipatory governance) and accordingly the adoption of a broad range of techniques (futures methodologies, multi-level modelling, scenario planning, etc.) to capture and control future spaces.  Such policies and
subsequent interventions (e.g. healthy / green towns) involve a range of assumptions about the relationships between bodies, spaces, technologies, natures, etc. which require further investigation. This call is therefore for papers which explore the spatial and temporal relationships of policies which claim the ability to secure the future.

Reference: Foucault M (2007) Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the College de France 1977-78. Translated by Graham Burchell.  Houndmills: Palgrave Macmilan

Papers may address (but are not limited to) the following issues in relation
to such policy:

The temporalities (habit, predictions, everydaylife) and spatialities of security;
The relationship between bodies and spaces; Methodologies for capturing future spaces;
The role of different populations in securing the future (age, gender,
ethnicity, etc);

The construction of urban natures/cultures;
Sites of impending crisis / intervention (city centres, towns, suburbs, etc);
The role of the environment / urban as an ameliorative device;
The construction of impending crises as a result of ‘urban’ spaces /environments;
The role of technologies;
Temporal and spatial aspects of mobilities;
Situating policy within place and time – attempts to apply models of success
from other places;
The conflation of different ‘crises’;
etc.

Please send abstracts to Bethan Evans (b.evans@mmu.ac.uk) by Friday 10th
October (deadline for registration with the AAG is 16th October)

Sexuality and space …

Call for Papers: Sexuality and Space
Annual Meeting of the Association of American Geographers, Las Vegas
22-27 March 2009

Co-Organised by Natalie Oswin (McGill) and Robert Vanderbeck (Leeds), on
behalf of the Sexuality and Space Specialty Group of the AAG

The Sexuality and Space Specialty Group is organising a series of
sessions for the 2009 annual meeting. We envision 4-5 sessions held
consecutively on the same day. Although we are open to papers on a range
of topics, we would particularly welcome papers on the following
themes/subthemes:

* the life course (e.g. migration, childhood/youth, age and ageing, life
transitions, temporalities, and related issues)

* religion and faith (e.g. religion and gay rights discourses; sexuality
and spirituality; anti-gay fundamentalisms; relations between secular
and religious gay activism)

* global intimacies (e.g. diaspora, geopolitics, global cities, scale,
mobilities, postcoloniality)

* legal geographies (e.g. the law and the transgender body; civil
unions; the policing of public sex; the regulation of sex work)

* domesticities (e.g. home and housing, family, ‘households’ and
cultural politics)

With these sessions, we hope to put various theoretical approaches (such
as queer, feminist, postcolonial, Marxist and poststructuralist) into
conversation as we explore the uses of sexuality in the production of
space.

Please send proposed titles and abstracts of up to 250 words to Robert
Vanderbeck (r.vanderbeck@leeds.ac.uk) or Natalie Oswin
(natalie.oswin@mcgill.ca) by October 3 2008.

And finally, the last one closely resembles an ‘alternative nationalism’ and subaltern studies.

AAG Call for Papers
Association of American Geographers Conference
Las Vegas, Nevada
Last Day for Session Registration: October 16, 2008

Geographies at the Margins: Interrogating Borders in South Asia

The phenomenon of nation-states is relatively new particularly in reference to South Asia. The dismantlement of the British Empire in India saw the birth of several nation-states such as India, Pakistan and later, Bangladesh. It was argued that the natural borders that lay between communities (Hindus and Muslims) could not be reconciled and thus, physical boundaries were necessary to separate the areas where the majority religion prevailed. Borders have become particularly sensitive in the subcontinent be it the partition boundaries or those with states such as Nepal, Burma or even Bhutan. In South Asia today, it is not just the physical borders between countries that are highly charged, but the ideological, social and economic borders that separate communities within each country itself.
We are interested in papers that interrogate these borders between communities and/or countries in South Asia. To this end, the definition of borders remains broad with the hope that authors will be able to not only discuss the geographies that are constructed or negotiated by communities living on the borders of countries, but also geographies that are created or negotiated by those living in other spatial margins such as those of cities or localities within cities.

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 Romola Sanyal: romola.sanyal@rice.edu or
Jason Cons jc162@cornell.edu