Most important CFP of all time

Geographies of Rumor and Conspiracy
Call for Papers: Association of American Geographers Annual Meeting (2010)
Sponsored by Political Geography Specialty Group

Organizers:
Alasdair Pinkerton (Royal Holloway, University of London) and Jason Dittmer (University College London)

This session explores the ways in which information, meaning, and interpretative frames circulate in, and remake, particular spaces. The papers in this session will explore processes of legitimation and de-legitimation, strategies for maintaining and/or violating the boundaries of acceptable knowledge, as well as epistemological and methodological problems associated with this kind of research. Additional foci might include technologies and practices of mediation, the study and collection of rumour and conspiracy by state and non-state organizations, their role in enabling certain forms of rumour and conspiracy, and the grounding of rumour and conspiracy in certain places and spaces. Papers are invited which either tackle contemporary examples (e.g. Obama’s citizenship) and/or historical geographies of rumour and conspiracy within the developed and developing worlds.

Those interested should please submit an abstract and their AAG registration PIN number to Alasdair Pinkerton (a.d.pinkerton@rhul.ac.uk) or Jason Dittmer (j.dittmer@ucl.ac.uk) no later than 15 October 2009.

CFP: Political Ecology of Resource Extraction in Latin America

Call for Papers, Association of American Geographers Annual Meeting, Washington DC, 14-18 April 2010

Session Title:  Emerging Research on the Political Ecology of Resource Extraction in Latin America

Abstract Submission Deadline: Oct. 21, 2009

Session organizers: Emily Billo, Syracuse University (erbillo@syr.edu)
Zoe Pearson, Ohio State University (pearson.190@osu.edu)

Protests against resource extraction in Latin America have recently become more visible and violent, most notably in Peru and Ecuador. This latest round of mobilizations may be attributed to what Anthony Bebbington has characterized as the “new extraction” in Latin America, and especially Andean nations. Focused on the shifting political economies of extraction regimes, this panel is designed to address emerging research, not only on the social responses to this new extraction, but also extractive activities themselves and their environmental impacts.

Despite political differences across governments, many are increasing pressure on local populations to open their lands to extractive activities, in order to fund so-called ‘socially responsible’ investments and programs at the national level (Bebbington 2009). In this session we aim to investigate the outcomes of intensified resource extraction as a tactic for development in Latin America. Papers will address the impacts of extractive models at multiple scales and with a variety of foci, including territorial claims and contradictions, livelihood impacts, ecology/the environment, and political agendas regarding extractivism. We welcome papers in the beginning stages of research.

Questions we hope to explore in this session include, but are not limited to:
•       How does the “new extractivism” affect populations indigenous to the sites of extraction?
•       How does resource extraction contribute to the ‘identity’ of a nation, and what does this mean for certain populations in the        context of citizenship and rights?
•       How does the new extractivism affect the formation of political identities and the mobilization strategies of contemporary social movements (and state responses to these)?

If you are interested in participating in this panel, please forward a short abstract to the session organizers by Oct. 21, 2009.
We welcome papers from students and faculty.

Questions may be directed to Emily Billo (erbillo@syr.edu) or Zoe Pearson (pearson.190@osu.edu).

CFP: Geographies of Tolerance

Call for papers Association of American Geographers Annual Meeting, Washington
April 14-18, 2010

Geographies of tolerance

Organised by Helen Wilson (Durham University), Ruth Healey (University of Chester) and Jonathan Darling (University of Manchester)

In recent years there has been a growing interest in the workings of tolerance as a political discourse – concerned with forms of difference, equality, identity, civic cohabitation and justice. Whilst growing fundamentalisms, refugee crises, concerns over uncontrolled immigration and threats to national security and modern secular societies have apparently challenged the widespread promotion of tolerance as a national quality, political issues such as segregation and social inequality are increasingly framed as matters of prejudice that demand a tolerant response (Brown 2006).  Tolerance is therefore attached to a range of sites and objects – cultures, races, sexualities, lifestyles, religions and so on, yet whilst it is generally perceived to be a common good and virtue, such attachment and its uncritical promotion as a generalised language of anti-prejudice has received considerable scrutiny. Tolerance can be the permission and acceptance of practices despite
disapproval of them; a mask that works to control violence and/or a concept that renders its subject deviant (Gibson 2007, Galeotti 2002). Rather than simply an individual ethic and practice, Brown in particular, demands that we consider how tolerance functions as a political discourse of state regulation and social organisation, that we question what kind of social subject it produces and what habits of civic cohabitation and orientation it might promote? Who is given the right and power to tolerate and who is marked as being in need of tolerance? Do those marked as ‘in need’ desire to be
tolerated? And how do such desires and impositions map onto contemporary geographies of exclusion, inequality and prejudice?

This session is interested in the multiple sites and workings of tolerance, how it might regulate identity and difference, inform judgements and everyday encounters, make distinctions between bodies and be experienced across a range of geographical scales and settings.  To this end, we invite papers addressing tolerance in a variety of different ways and at different scales – Some possible areas might include, but not be limited to;

•        The role of tolerance in constructing place
•        The relationship between tolerance and the construction of identity and/or subjectivities
•        How tolerance might be performed and experienced in everyday encounters
•        Conceptual engagements with tolerance as a political discourse
•        The shifting nature of tolerance across geographical scales and settings
•        How tolerance is, and might be, promoted
•        The limits and conditions, of tolerance
•        The relation between ideas of tolerance, charity and civic virtue
•        The promotion of tolerance as a lifestyle
•        The uses of tolerance to the state
•        The objects of tolerance
•        The relationship between tolerance and modalities of power

Expressions of interest from potential contributors should be sent to Helen Wilson (h.f.wilson@durham.ac.uk), Ruth Healey (r.healey@chester.ac.uk), and Jonathan Darling (jonathan.darling@manchester.ac.uk) in the form of an abstract acceptable to the AAG of 250 words or less (http://aag.org/annualmeetings/2010/papers.htm#abstracts) by 21st October
2009.

References
Brown (2006) Regulating Aversion : Tolerance in the Age of Identity, Princeton University Press
Galoetti (2002) Toleration As Recognition. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press

Gibson (2007) ‘‘Abusing our hospitality’. Inhospitableness and the politics of deterrence’ in Molz, J. and Gibson, S. (eds) Mobilizing hospitality : the ethics of social relations in a mobile world. Aldershot, Ashgate

CFP: Territory, nationalism, and homeland in political geography

CFP: 2010 Annual Meetings of the AAG, Washington, DC, April 14-18

Territory, nationalism, and homeland in political geography

Organizers: Ted Holland, Adam Levy, and Natalie Koch (University of Colorado, Boulder)

Political geography, as a sub-discipline, has a long tradition of theoretical and empirical engagement with the interconnected concepts of territory and nationality. Nationalism is fundamentally a territorial project, which seeks to make the boundaries of the cultural group, or nation, congruent with those of the political container, or state.  Efforts to bind the national group and define its members as citizens involve more than a simple hyphen between nation and state, and are often mediated through the idea of “homeland.” Yet, as Diener (2009) has recently noted, homeland itself remains a slippery subject for many reasons.  In his view, the subject eludes sustained and focused academic inquiry, partially due to the prosaic, accepted nature of homeland, and partially because of its multivalent definition.

In this session, we seek to bring together papers that engage—whether theoretically, methodologically, empirically, or critically—with concepts of “homeland”, as variously defined.  Recognizing the variety of ways in which this notion has been conceptualized and operationalized, this session aims to incorporate scholarship that facilitates a more robust theoretical definition of and/or empirical engagement with the concept of homeland using a geographic lens.  A diversity of methodological and epistemological approaches is encouraged and the scope is not limited to any particular region.  Rather, in recognizing the pervasiveness of homeland as an idea, this session seeks develop a more rigorous and comparative framework to determine how such spaces form and function.

Potential paper topics include, but are not limited to, the following:

•           Multi-sited and multi-national homelands

•           The banality of homeland

•           The iconography of homeland

•           The production or imagination of homeland at the local, regional, or nation-state scales

•           Homeland and diasporic communities or transnational migration movements

•           Homeland security across geographic contexts

•           Cartographies or ‘mental maps’ of homeland

•           Homeland as liminal space at the political margins; Homelands as/in peripheries

•           Romantic, literary, architectural, artistic, folkloric engagements with homelands

•           Practical (geo)political engagements with homeland

•           Methodological approaches to situating homelands, including quantitative, qualitative and ethnographic approaches

•           Historical transformations of past and present homelands

•           Intersections of homeland, gender, race, and class

Please submit queries and abstracts (approximately 250 words) to Ted Holland (Edward.Holland@colorado.edu), Adam Levy (Adam.Levy@colorado.edu), or Natalie Koch (Natalie.Koch@colorado.edu).  Abstracts will be accepted until October 10.  Depending on interest, we will organize multiple sessions on the topic.

Reference:

Diener, A.C. 2009.  One Homeland or Two? The Nationalization and Transnationalization of Mongolia’s Kazakhs.  Washington, DC: Woodrow Wilson Center Press.

It’s going to be a good meeting for political geography!

Annual Conference of the Association of American Geographers, 14-18th April 2010, Washington DC.

Call for Papers – Territory and Cartography: Politics, History, Techniques

Session organisers: Jeremy Crampton (Georgia State) and Stuart Elden (Durham)

The relation between cartography and territory seems well-known. State territories are one of the key objects of cartographic work, both in terms of their depiction on geopolitical maps and in terms of the state agencies that produce maps of their territory. Here we want to reverse the question: to what extent is cartography productive of territory? If territory can be understood as a political technology, comprising a range of techniques for the measurement of land and the control of terrain, then cartography, alongside land surveying and the military, is one of those techniques; part of what might be conceived of as state territorial strategies.

This session aims to bring together papers analysing maps politically in terms of their relation to the state and its territory, drawing on a range of historical and geographical contexts. A focus on the techniques involved is particularly welcome, but the papers should principally speak to the question: if we know that the map is not the territory, to what extent is it still productive of it?

Proposals should be sent to both stuart.elden@durham.ac.uk and jcrampton@gsu.edu by 5th October 2009.

Should the papers form a sufficiently coherent collection, there is the possibility of a follow-up workshop and/or publication at some future point

It’s that time of year…

Call for Papers
Association of American Geographers annual meeting Washington, DC, USA – April 14-18, 2010
Proposed Session Title: Political Ecology in the Far North
Organizers: Kolson Schlosser, Clarkson University and Meredith Marchioni, Clarkson University
Discussant: Andrea Nightingale, The University of Edinburgh

Description: Political ecology research in Arctic and sub-Arctic regions is obviously highly varied, but the impact of climate change on the region has made commonalities amongst this research well worth exploring. This proposed session would provide a venue through which to bridge this research and explore its commonalities. We are especially interested in political ecology (broadly defined) research related to climate change, but research unrelated to climate change is more than welcomed as well. For the purpose of this session, the ‘Far North’ is defined broadly to include all Arctic and reasonably sub-Arctic regions. The session will have four papers and a discussant, and could potentially have a second session if necessary.

If interested, please email Kolson Schlosser at kschloss@clarkson.edu. Please include a title and an abstract (a temporary, informal one is fine).

CALL FOR PAPERS

Association of American Geographers Annual Meeting, Washington DC, 14-18 April 2010

From conflict to cooperation: Spaces of engagement, resource governance and the extractive industries

Abstract submission deadline: Wednesday, October 21, 2009

Organizers: James Van Alstine, University of Leeds (j.vanalstine@leeds.ac.uk)
Roy Maconachie, University of Bath (r.maconachie@bath.ac.uk)

Co-sponsored by the Cultural and Political Ecology, Development Geographies and Political Geography Specialty Groups

Multiple and often conflicting discourses characterize the impacts of natural resource extraction on host communities. On the one hand, the extractive industries have significant social, economic and environmental impacts on the communities and countries in which they operate; on the other, if well governed, the sector can contribute to sustainable local development and poverty reduction. This session seeks to explore the geographies of community-company-government engagement in host communities impacted by the extraction of energy and non-energy minerals. Community engagement with extraction may differ depending on stages of the project cycle, ranging from exploration to closure. Often ‘engagement’ emerges as a sort of place-based accountability and scalar politics ranging on a spectrum from conflict to cooperation. In exploring this continuum, the session aims to gain insight into how engagement processes within extractive contexts result in distinct governance outcomes (e.g. community-development funds, participatory monitoring schemes, site closure/interruption, etc). A broad range of papers is invited from different theoretical perspectives (e.g. local livelihoods, political ecology and political economy), including submissions from practitioners.

If you are interested in presenting a paper in this session, please forward a short abstract to the organizers by Wednesday, October 21, 2009. Please direct any questions to the organizers listed above.

AAG CFP? Yeah, you know me

Call for Papers
Annual Meeting of the Association of American Geographers April 14-18, 2010, Washington, D.C.

DEBATING THE THEORY, PRACTICE & IMPACT OF TRANSFRONTIER CONSERVATION

The last decade has witnessed the resurgence of the ecosystem approach and the consequent commitment to transfrontier conservation by states, Big Non-Governmental Organizations (BINGOs), philanthropists, and investors. Often rallying around claims that “nature knows no boundaries,” proponents suggest that transfrontier conservation areas (TFCAs) have the potential to protect biodiversity and enable ecological restoration and equally promote economic development, community upliftment, and political goodwill among participating states. While critics remain unconvinced of these promises, they agree with TFCA supporters that, as these initiatives move from the pages of planning documents to the stage of implementation, they profoundly alter not only physical terrain but also political, social, cultural, and economic landscapes.
We invite papers that examine transfrontier conservation along the following
topics:
* TFCAs and state formation / state sovereignty
* Transfrontier conservation and regional integration
* TFCAs and “local” communities; community-based conservation; “fortress”
conservation
* Implications of transfrontier conservation for nationalism and nation building
* TFCAs and the transformation of borders and borderlands
* Ecological corridors and TFCAs
* TFCAs and regimes of international development
* The history of transfrontier conservation thought and practice
* The neoliberalization of transfrontier conservation
* BINGOs and transfrontier conservation

Interested persons should send an abstract (max. 250 words), your name, and your contact information to Elizabeth Lunstrum (lunstrum@yorku.ca) and Maano Ramutsindela (Maano.Ramutsindela@uct.ac.za) by October, 15.

Another AAG CFP

Call For Papers

2010 Association of American Geographers (AAG) Annual Meeting Washington, D.C., April 14-18, 2010

Change or continuity? Obama’s ‘new beginning’ and geographies of urban violence in the Muslim world.

Organisers: Sara Fregonese (Royal Holloway, University of London) and Adam Ramadan (University of Cambridge).

The ways the representation and the materiality of cities shape discourses
and practices of violence have attracted attention in the past decade. The
Middle Eastern (often Muslim) city has been theorised in urban geopolitics
and political geography as a particular target of military operations and
urbicidal destruction, justified by discourses of war on terror typical of
the Bush years. Baghdad, Fallujah, Gaza and Beirut are only a few recent
examples of discursively demonised and consequently attacked cities in the
Muslim world.

On June 4 2009, newly elected Barack Obama called for ‘a new beginning’ in
relations between the US and Muslims communities around the world.  The new geopolitics of responsibility and mutual respect outlined by Obama would mark a sharp departure from the ‘colonial present’ of the Bush era.

This session invites reflections on the new geopolitical discourses of the
Obama era and assessments of their (changing?) material consequences and
their relationships with geographies of violence in Middle Eastern and
Muslim cities. The session searches for changes and continuities between the
Bush and Obama eras, in representations of Middle Eastern and Muslim spaces and actions deriving from them. Finally, it questions potential spaces of exclusion from Obama’s new geopolitical vision of the Muslim world and its
material consequences.

Papers are welcome within the following themes:

-          Geographies of violence in the post-Bush Muslim city

-          Emerging actors and networks of urban warfare and contestation

-          The production of new targets

-          The role of the city in US military doctrine and operations

-          Representations of the Muslim city in official geopolitics

-          Popular geopolitics of the post-Bush Muslim city

-          Change or continuity in Obama’s ‘new beginning’

-          Ongoing urbicides: excluded, left behind, unchanged spaces in the
today’s Muslim city

-          The implications of Obama’s geopolitical discursive shift for the
conceptual and geopolitical value of urbicide

Please submit an abstract following the guidelines
http://www.aag.org/annualmeetings/2010/papers.htm#abstracts to Sara
Fregonese (sara.fregonese@rhul.ac.uk) or Adam Ramadan (afr24@cam.ac.uk) by 12 October 2009.

Conference Announcement — IGU Israel

The main IGU meeting will take place in Tel Aviv July 12-16 2010.   This will be preceded by a four day pre-IGU Political Geography workshop at Ben Gurion University in beer Sheva.- Borders, Territory and Conflict in a Globalized World   Final registration date is 20th November 2009 Registration for the main conference via the Conference web site registration for the pre-conference workshop to the email addresses in the enclosed document.   Please see enclosed details

CALL FOR PAPERS

IGU ISRAEL JULY 2010

COMMISSION ON POLITICAL GEOGRAPHY (CPG)

The International Geographical Union (IGU) will be holding its Regional Conference in Tel Aviv, Israel, on July 12-16 July  2010.

The IGU Commission on Political Geography  IGU CPG will be organizing three sessions at the major conference (and two jointly organized with the MRP ? Mediterranean Renaissance Program), and a pre-conference workshop which will take place at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, immediately prior to the main event, from 7-11 July, 2010.

Interested participants are invited to submit papers for either (and both) of the meetings:

IGU Meeting ? Tel Aviv 12-16 July 2010: BRIDGING DIVERSITY IN A GLOBALIZED WORLD: THE CHANGING GEOPOLITICAL STRUCTURES OF THE MEDITERRANEAN AND THE MIDDLE EAST

The north-south/south-north and east-west/west-east relations within the Mediterranean Basin have never been as intensive as at the dawn of the 21^st century. The Mediterranean is no longer the sole interest of the Mediterranean Rim countries in Euro-Asia and Africa, or even of the named continents; it has become transformed into a global playground of interests. Over the past decade, we have witnessed dual globalization narratives,  a  trend toward more homogeneous global conditions (as the result of the widespread competition) and, at one and the same time, a parallel trend in which differences are enhanced as localities ? often set free through globalization itself –  strive to maintain their unique identities. Globalization in the Mediterranean represents a complex set of processes, which political geographers have only just begun to understand.

In the Political Geography sessions of the IGU Regional Meeting in Tel Aviv, we wish to explore the following topics:  

-         The Changing Geopolitical Structures of the Mediterranean and the Middle East
-         Borders in the Mediterranean (organized jointly by the IGU Mediterranean Renaissance Program and the IGU Commission on Political Geography);
-         Globalisation, Glocalisaion and Territorial Identity in the Mediterranean Rim;
-         The Geopolitics of Counter-Globalization Narratives
-         Engineering the Mediterranean -  Transnational Projects and their Spatial Impacts;
-         Global Warming and Geopolitical Implications Related to the Mediterranean Basin  (organized jointly by the IGU Mediterranean Renaissance Program and the IGU Commission on Political Geography);

Pre-Conference Workshop ? Ben-Gurion University 7-11 July 2010: BORDERS, TERRITORY AND CONFLICT IN A GLOBALISING WORLD

The workshop will focus on the changing relationships between Borders, Territory and Conflict in a Globalised World. Sessions will negotiate the two contrasting narratives of a borderless world on the one hand, and the notions of territorial securitization which have re-emerged in the post 9/11 world, on the other hand.  Although some local issues will be discussed, we wish to focus on the conceptualization of the linkages between borders, territory and conflict at a variety of spatial scales. Participants are invited  to submit papers on any of the following themes:

-         Borders in a Borderless World
-         Territory in a Deterritorialized World
-         Borders, Territory and Conflict Under Conditions of Globalization
-         Borders, Territory and Conflict in the Mediterranean Region

-         Borders, Territory and Conflict in the Contemporary Middle East
-         Geopolitical Change Under Conditions of Globalization
-         The Politics of Cartography and Geopolitical Representations

The pre-conference workshop will include a field trip, to be co-organised with the Commission on Indigenous Groups whose pre-conference workshop will also be taking place at Ben-Gurion University. local organizer Professor Oren Yiftachel.

Original papers in the field of Political Geography and Geopolitics will be considered for publication in Geopolitics.

Further details concerning accommodation and costs etc, will be sent out at a later date. Every effort will be made to keep the costs of the pre-conference workshop to a minimum (to cover hotel and food expenses). Registration and payment for the main IGU must be carried out separately on the official IGU forms.

Submission of abstracts and intent to participate should be sent on the enclosed registration form, no later than 20^th November 2009,  to:

Prof Anton Gosar, Chair of the Commission: anton.gosar@guest.arnes.si

Prof David Newman, Secretary of the Commission and local organizer: newman@bgu.ac.il