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.