2022 American Association of Geographers Annual Meeting
February 25 - March 1 Call for Papers Volumize the Social: Expansiveness, Interiority, Containment, and Depth through the Lens of Relations Session Organizers: Kai Bosworth, Virginia Commonwealth University María A. Pérez, West Virginia University How are voluminous spaces socially mediated, constructed, or experienced? What socio-cultural relations emerge, contest, or create conditions of expansiveness, interiority, containment, or depth? The last decade has seen a proliferation of geographical inquiries into vertical terrains and territories (Billé 2020; Braun 2000; Elden 2013; Marston 2019; Melo Zurita and Munro 2019), volumetric and voluminous phenomena in subterranean (Himley and Marston 2019; Squire and Dodds 2019; Woon and Dodds 2021), aerial (Adey, Whitehead, and Williams 2013), or aqueous domains (Sammler 2020; Steinberg and Peters 2015), and even thoughtful methodological considerations that such approaches require (Jackman and Squire 2021). As an opportunity to take stock of this now voluminous scholarship with impacts beyond geography (Billé 2018; Hardenberg and Mahony 2020), we consider pathways not yet taken, or angles less studied, by contemporary geographers. Many examinations of vertical or voluminous spatialities have tended at times to overlook or diminish the rich social and culturally diverse worlds that populate, create, and make meaning of these “voluminous” spaces or phenomena, not just because of their rich and complex materialities and liveliness materially but also their imaginative force across space and time (Eshleman 2003; Hawkins 2020a; 2020b; Pike 2007). These may include—but frequently exceed—institutions associated with states and geopolitics, science and technology, and firms and extractive capital. Voluminous spaces are also productive of social and cultural meaning, to the point that a given space may not fit in the categories—vertical, geological, material—otherwise framed as neutral or universal. How does our understanding of voluminous spaces shift if we orient our attention to the social worlds that make/take these spaces as meaningful? In an insightful response to Stuart Elden’s oft-cited “Secure the Volume,” Peter Adey concludes by asking us to consider “how these volumes are lived-in or not, what they feel like and how they might be reclaimed or made anew, and how ultimately other social and cultural registers might tell other sorts of stories” (Adey 2013, 54). Taking Adey’s call as inspiration, this session seeks to reflect upon, and intervene in, the assumptions and absences characterizing contemporary thinking about volumes. We invite creative papers which widen and play with the conceptual and methodological boundaries of “voluminous” spaces or phenomena by engaging them through the lens of sociality and relations/relatedness, however understood. Attention to culturally and historically contingent qualities of relations and their voluminous dimensions are especially welcome. Our aim is to have a broad enough frame to allow for linkages across currently disparate domains, such as considerations of voluminous spaces in sites of ritual and other cultural practices, political activism and contestation, quotidian and intimate everyday life, aesthetic reflection and creative production. From these perspectives, we expect a broadening and even challenge to our current repertoire of volumetric/voluminous spaces and phenomena: yes, caves, bunkers, mines, burrows, oceans, and tunnels, but also closets and attics, algae vats, burial sites, volumes of/as text or sound, and even children’s forts where life worlds and imaginaries thrive. We welcome interdisciplinary scholarship that pushes the boundaries of cross-cultural and even intergenerational voluminous thinking and experiences through shared conversations with anthropology, archeology, architecture, cultural studies, and more. Please send an abstract of up to 250 words by Friday, October 15, to Kai Bosworth ([email protected]). Accepted participants will be notified on October 18 and will need to submit abstracts to AAG’s system by its deadline October 19 (unless extended). Please indicate whether you prefer to participate in person or virtually. References Cited: Adey, Peter. 2013. “Securing the Volume/Volumen: Comments on Stuart Elden’s Plenary Paper ‘Secure the Volume.’” Political Geography 34: 52–54. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.polgeo.2013.01.003. Adey, Peter, Mark Whitehead, and Allison Williams. 2013. From above: War, Violence and Verticality. London: Hurst. Billé, Franck. 2018. “Introduction: Speaking Volumes — Cultural Anthropology.” 2018. https://culanth.org/fieldsights/1241-introduction-speaking-volumes. ———. 2020. Voluminous States: Sovereignty, Materiality, and the Territorial Imagination. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Braun, B. 2000. “Producing Vertical Territory: Geology and Governmentality in Late Victorian Canada.” ECUMENE 7 (1): 7–46. https://doi.org/10.1177/096746080000700102. Elden, Stuart. 2013. “Secure the Volume: Vertical Geopolitics and the Depth of Power.” Political Geography 34: 35–51. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.polgeo.2012.12.009. Eshleman, Clayton. 2003. Juniper Fuse: Upper Paleolithic Imagination & the Construction of the Underworld. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press. Hardenberg, Wilko Graf von, and Martin Mahony. 2020. “Introduction—Up, down, Round and Round: Verticalities in the History of Science.” Centaurus 62 (4): 595–611. https://doi.org/10.1111/1600-0498.12347. Hawkins, Harriet. 2020a. “‘A Volcanic Incident’: Towards a Geopolitical Aesthetics of the Subterranean.” Geopolitics 25 (1): 214–39. https://doi.org/10.1080/14650045.2017.1399877. ———. 2020b. “Underground Imaginations, Environmental Crisis and Subterranean Cultural Geographies.” Cultural Geographies 27 (1): 3–22. https://doi.org/10.1177/1474474019886832. Himley, Matthew, and Andrea Marston. 2019. “Geographies of the Underground in Latin America.” Journal of Latin American Geography 19 (1): 172–81. https://doi.org/10.1353/lag.2020.0024. Jackman, Anna, and Rachael Squire. 2021. “Forging Volumetric Methods.” Area n/a (n/a). https://doi.org/10.1111/area.12712. Marston, Andrea. 2019. “Strata of the State: Resource Nationalism and Vertical Territory in Bolivia.” Political Geography 74 (October): 102040. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.polgeo.2019.102040. Melo Zurita, Maria de Lourdes, and Paul George Munro. 2019. “Voluminous Territorialisation: Historical Contestations over the Yucatan Peninsula’s Subterranean Waterscape.” Geoforum 102: 38–47. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2019.03.019. Pike, David Lawrence. 2007. Metropolis on the Styx: The Underworlds of Modern Urban Culture, 1800-2001. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Sammler, Katherine G. 2020. “The Rising Politics of Sea Level: Demarcating Territory in a Vertically Relative World.” Territory, Politics, Governance 8 (5): 604–20. https://doi.org/10.1080/21622671.2019.1632219. Squire, Rachael, and Klaus Dodds. 2019. “Introduction to the Special Issue: Subterranean Geopolitics.” Geopolitics 0 (0): 1–13. https://doi.org/10.1080/14650045.2019.1609453. Steinberg, Philip, and Kimberley Peters. 2015. “Wet Ontologies, Fluid Spaces: Giving Depth to Volume through Oceanic Thinking.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 33 (2): 247–64. https://doi.org/10.1068/d14148p. Woon, Chih Yuan, and Klaus Dodds. 2021. “Subterranean Geopolitics: Designing, Digging, Excavating and Living.” Geoforum, May. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2021.03.007. Dimensions of Political Ecology 2020
Rachael Baker, University of Illinois at Chicago Kai Bosworth, Virginia Commonwealth University Lisa Santosa, University of Minnesota Political ecologists over the past twenty years have increasingly centralized the intersection of race and racism with ecological governance, green political economies, natural resource extraction, and the production of waste and disposability (Bonds and Inwood 2016, Moore et al 2003, Pulido 2017). Cutting-edge scholarship at DOPE frequently contends that nature is a site of power and struggle, and that securing nature through governance, ownership, and monetization is central to the racial ontologies and projects of white supremacy and settler colonialism (Brahinsky et al 2014, Schulz, 2017, Theriault 2017, Van Sant et. al. 2020). While neo-Malthusianisms, nationalist environmentalisms, and eugenic environmental determinisms have long been objects of critique for political ecologists (Taylor 2016), the recent rise of neo-/eco-fascisms (e.g. Forchtner 2019) challenges scholars and activists to hone our precision and modes of intervention for the ongoing struggle for a livable future. Although not without precedent then, it is incontrovertible that the far right has been emboldened globally to produce more explicit regimes of communication and administration that intervene in ecological futures. This session contends that we need precision concerning the continuities and discontinuities, historically and in the present, among liberal, administrative, and scientific modes of governance and emergent (if always present) forms of far right political organizing. Thus not only our conceptual frameworks, but also our activist/political actions need to be recalibrated to more effectively respond to structural, social and cultural manifestations of white supremacy. Taking such responsibility, however, also requires that we confront the ways that examining such movements can expose uncomfortable continuities with ecological policy and administration, academic institutions and their modes of education, and desires for more just ecologies. How do political ecologies of the far right - such as so-called environmental nativism, ecofascism, climate apartheid, or climate barbarism - change how race and racism are conceptualized in environmental movements, and how we understand the contested terrain of nature or ecology alongside decolonial, anti-racist, and anti-fascist struggle? What is new or different in the current range of far right articulations of ecology, and what is an extension or cycle of earlier eugenic and populationist forms of governance? Are contemporary liberal or leftist concepts and methods appropriate for describing and evaluating far right movements, or do we require new or different tools? How could attention toward far-right ideology, tactics, and ways of relating to nature inform better strategies for liberation or abolitionist approaches to political ecology? We seek empirical, theoretical, and activist/political interventions, evaluations, or reflections not limited to the following topics:
Works cited: Bonds, Anne, and Joshua Inwood. 2016. “Beyond White Privilege: Geographies of White Supremacy and Settler Colonialism.” Progress in Human Geography 40 (6): 715–733. Brahinsky, Rachel, Jade Sasser and Laura-Anne Minkoff‐Zern. 2014. “Race, Space, and Nature: An Introduction and Critique.” Antipode, 46(5), 1135-1152. Forchtner, Bernhard, ed. 2019. The Far Right and the Environment. Abingdon and New York: Routledge. Van Sant, Levi, Richard Milligan, and Sharlene Mollett. 2020. “Political ecologies of race: Settler colonialism and environmental racism in the US and Canada.” Antipode. Moore, Donald S. Jake Kosek, and Anand Pandian. 2003. Race, nature, and the politics of difference. Durham: Duke University Press. Pulido, Laura. 2017. “Geographies of race and ethnicity II: Environmental racism, racial capitalism and state-sanctioned violence.” Progress in Human Geography, 41(4), 524-533. Schulz, Karsten A. 2017. “Decolonizing political ecology: ontology, technology and 'critical' enchantment.” Journal of Political Ecology, 24(1), 125-143. Taylor, Dorceta E. 2016. The Rise of the American Conservation Movement: Power, Privilege, and Environmental Protection. Durham: Duke University Press. Theriault, Noah. 2017. “A forest of dreams: Ontological multiplicity and the fantasies of environmental government in the Philippines.” Political Geography 58, 114-127. CFP: Strengthening infrastructures of resistance to fossil fuel infrastructures in North America
Martina Angela Caretta, West Virginia University Pavithra Vasudevan, The University of Texas at Austin Kai Bosworth, Virginia Commonwealth University Energy independence has been a major policy goal of recent US energy governance regimes. The development of increasingly advanced technologies for oil and gas extraction, in the form of hydraulic fracturing, has been framed as crucial for the well-being of the nation. The magnitude and acceleration of this energy infrastructure development raises concerns about the substantial infrastructural, ecological and social impacts exacerbating socioeconomic inequalities across the US, particularly among poor communities that have been historically disenfranchised in energy decision-making. Unconventional oil and gas extraction and transport often happen in small rural communities and in communities of color; their surroundings are turned into industrial sites, with little input in the development, construction and location of gas pads, pipelines, frac sand mines, and cracker plants. Transmission and distribution networks are developed through eminent domain in the name of ensuring public energy access and distribution, enacting a transfer of land and wealth to private companies profiting heavily from pipeline construction. Landowners and Indigenous communities are required to sacrifice part of their property and territory to allegedly guarantee national energy independence, even while much of the gas could be heading for export (Estes, 2019; Estes and Dhillon 2019; Bosworth, 2019; Finley-Brook et al, 2018; Ordner, 2019; Spice 2018; Whyte, 2017). We seek scholars invested in conducting research alongside and/or in support of grassroots efforts against energy infrastructure development to join an emergent network against North American extractive industry. This paper session (preceeded by a panel) will focus specifically on critical/feminist geographic research projects committed to repurposing the tools of academic, government and corporate knowledge-making towards justice-oriented projects (Zaragocin 2019; Dalton and Stallmann 2018), to amplify the experiences and political knowledges of communities most deeply impacted by racial capitalism and settler colonialism. We are interested in producing collaborative research on energy infrastructure development in North America that clarifies and compiles the impacts of extractive industries through the integration of trans-disciplinary findings; translates existing knowledges into accessible forms such as graphic narratives and audiovisual testimonials for use in organizing campaigns; and magnifies the utility and political insights of geography towards creating a livable world. We value the distinct contributions of plural scientific and social modes of knowledge production, and invite papers that examine energy infrastructures development with the following approaches: ethnographic work on/with frontline communities, hydrological studies, census data, survey and focus group data, legal scholarship, financial and economic analyses, public health approaches, social movement analyses, industry discourses, security studies, public participation in permitting, citizen science and counter-expertise, legal challenges, energy analyses. If you are interested in participating in a paper session, please email a title and 150 word abstract to [email protected] and [email protected] by Sept. 26th. You will receive a notification of acceptance within a few days FYI: First registration deadline is Oct. 9th, and you will need to submit your abstract by Oct. 30th. References Bosworth, K. 2019. The People Know Best: Situating the Counterexpertise of Populist Pipeline Opposition Movements. Annals of the American Association of Geographers, 109(2), 581–592. https://doi.org/10.1080/24694452.2018.1494538 Dalton, C. M., and Tim Stallmann. 2018. "Counter‐mapping data science." The Canadian Geographer/Le Géographe Canadien 62(1): 93-101. Estes, N. 2019. Our history is our future. London and New York: Verso. Estes, Nick, and Jaskiran Dhillon, eds. 2019. Standing with Standing Rock: Voices from the #NoDAPL Movement. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Finley-Brook, M. et al. 2018. “Critical energy justice in US natural gas infrastructuring.” Energy Research & Social Science, 41(1): 176-190. Ordner, J. 2019. “Petro-politics and local natural resource protection: Grassroots opposition to the Keystone XL pipeline in Nebraska.” In: The Right to Nature E. Apostolopoulou & J. A. Cortes-Vazquez (Eds.). New York: Routledge. Spice, A. 2018. “Fighting Invasive Infrastructures: Indigenous Relations against Pipelines.” Environment & Society 9(1): 40-56. Whyte, K.P. Kyle Powys. 2017. “The Dakota Access pipeline, environmental injustice, and U.S. colonialism” Red Ink. 19(1): 154-169. Zaragocin, Sofia. 2019. "Feminist geography in Ecuador." Gender, Place & Culture 26: 1032-1038.. AAG 2019 CFP On the blockade: geographies of circulation and struggle
Kai Bosworth, Institute at Brown for Environment and Society, Brown University Charmaine Chua, Department of Politics, Oberlin College Alongside the riot and the occupation, perhaps the most widespread tactic under use is once again the blockade. Attempts by workers and activists to prevent ecological destruction, fossil fuel infrastructure, global supply chains, and the everyday circulation of capital pepper the news around the world. Over twenty years ago, Nicholas Blomley began his formative analysis of First Nations blockades in Canada by suggesting that the “very frequency and predictability” might explain “why blockades have not received much scholarly attention as a political phenomenon” (Blomley 1996, 5). Today, we suspect a rich intellectual environment currently exists for reopening empirical and theoretical questions concerning political blockades. This includes a range of scholarship in infrastructure studies (Kallianos 2018), logistics and counterlogistics (Bernes 2013, Chua, Danyluk et al, 2018), urban geography (Maharawal 2017, Vizcarra and Araiza Kokinis 2014), contemporary environmentalism (Klein 2014) and spaces of contentious politics (Leitner et. al. 2008, Routledge 2017, Wainwright and Robertson 2003). Analyses focused on blockades have frequently (and sometimes romantically) examined their role as moments of negation or disruption that mount a challenge to the circulation of contemporary capitalism (Clover 2016). In efforts to complicate this narrative, some have rightly pointed out that disruption can at times benefit the price-setting of corporations and the logic of capitalism more generally (Mitchell 2013). On the other hand, others caution that as the blockade has become a critical tool to assert collective power through the sovereignty of the people or indigenous jurisdiction, the state has securitized flows of commodities through an increasing emphasis on critical infrastructure (Pasternak and Dafnos 2018), perhaps suggesting greater attention to the forms of state violence and repression. Yet, even if blockades are sometimes less effective than we might hope, they remain fertile sites for expressing a richness of social subjectivities, forms of contestation, spaces of social reproduction, and deterritorializations and reterritorializations of capital and state space. As Deborah Cowen puts it, “It is perhaps on the blockade [where] alternative relations of care and provision – alternative logistics – anchored in relations of reciprocity and solidarity can emerge” (Cowen 2017). At stake in analyses of the blockade might thus be efforts to foreground “shared capacities to survive immiserating processes and to fight back against violent infrastructures” (Armstrong-Price 2015, 191). This session will present a rich reading of contemporary or historical blockades as protest tactics, spaces of disruption, and social (re)productions of subjects and worlds, seeking to theorize their situation within a broader and complex global political economy riven by power geometries of state and capital, while at the same time keeping alive their potential to affirm worlds otherwise. What can we learn about space, politics, and capital from blockades? How do they alert us to arenas of struggle for lives and livelihoods absent from traditional analyses of capitalism, social protest, or infrastructural flow? If global supply chains and logistics management has reshaped the spatialities of capitalism, are new points of vulnerability - chokepoints - created which might be pressured for political justice? Please email 250 word abstracts to [email protected] and [email protected] by October 20. We would be particularly interested in scholars working on topics such as: Black lives matter and freeway blockades Immobilizing Google busses and high-tech cities Pipeline, refinery, and tanker blockades Indigenous struggles for decolonization and/or exercising sovereignty Theorizing surplus populations and circulation struggles Transportation and mobility struggles such as ZAD, NoTAV, Sanrizuka Port shutdowns and ocean space Social reproduction of/at the blockade Blockades and police/security/military Logistics and counter-logistical movements Crowd theory and collective affect and subjectivity Territorialities of state, capital, and private property Research methods and epistemologies for blockading Blockading the blockade: against border violence, fortress Europe, the Gaza seige Selected bibliography: Armstrong-Price, Amanda. 2015. “Infrastructures of Injury” LIES: A Journal of Materialist Feminism Vol 2. Bernes, Jasper. 2013. “Logistics, Counterlogistics and the Communist Prospect.” Endnotes Vol 3. Blomley, Nicholas. 1996. “‘Shut the Province Down’: First Nations Blockades in British Columbia, 1984-1995.” BC Studies: The British Columbian Quarterly, no. 111: 5–35. Chua, Danyluk, Cowen and Khalili. 2018. “Turbulent Circulation: Building a Critical Engagement with Logistics.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 36 (4): 617-629. Clover, Joshua. 2016. Riot. Strike. Riot: The New Era of Uprisings. London: Verso Books. Cowen, Deborah. 2017. “The Special Power of Disruption in an Age of Logistical Warfare.” OpenDemocracy. https://www.opendemocracy.net/digitaliberties/krystian-woznicki-deborah-cowen/acts-of-disruption. Kallianos, Yannis. 2018. “Infrastructural Disorder: The Politics of Disruption, Contingency, and Normalcy in Waste Infrastructures in Athens.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 36 (4): 758–75. Klein, Naomi. 2014. This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate. New York: Simon & Schuster. Leitner, Helga, Eric Sheppard, and Kristin M. Sziarto. 2008. “The Spatialities of Contentious Politics.” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 33 (2): 157–172. Maharawal, Manissa. 2017. “San Francisco’s Tech-Led Gentrification: Public Space, Protest, and the Urban Commons.” In City Unsilenced: Urban Resistance and Public Space in the Age of Shrinking Democracy, edited by Jeffrey Hou and Sabine Knierbein. Taylor & Francis. Pasternak, Shiri, and Tia Dafnos. 2018. “How Does a Settler State Secure the Circuitry of Capital?” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 36 (4): 739–57. Routledge, Paul. 2017. Space Invaders: Radical Geographies of Protest. London: Pluto Press. Vizcarra, Jael, and Troy Andreas Araiza Kokinis. 2014. “Freeway Takeovers: The Reemergence of the Collective through Urban Disruption.” Tropics of Meta (blog). December 5, 2014. https://tropicsofmeta.com/2014/12/05/freeway-takeovers-the-reemergence-of-the-collective-through-urban-disruption/. Wainwright, Joel, and Morgan Robertson. 2003. “Territorialization, Science and the Colonial State: The Case of Highway 55 in Minnesota.” Cultural Geographies 10 (2): 196–217. Click here to download a public comment, written with Julie Santella, concerning the proposed Dewey-Burdock in-situ uranium mine and its implications for environmental justice.
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