My apologies for multiple cross-postings. Please distribute widely. Call for Papers:
Sacrifice in Geography 2013 Annual AAG Meeting, Los Angeles, CA April 9-13, 2013 Alec Brownlow DePaul University Department of Geography Chicago, IL 60614 In its original usage, the expression, Sacrifice Zone, was adopted to describe those macrogeographies (landscapes and regions) that were poisoned, destroyed, and forever alienated in the wake of decades of nuclear production and testing during the Cold War.[i] The expression suggests the politics and the geographies of disposability insofar as it captures the state's discriminatory powers in matters of life and death, productivity and obsolescence, and its permissiveness of economic, ecologic, social, and cultural ruin in the name of ideological hegemony qua military strength. Most recently, journalists Chris Hedges and Joe Sacco, in their book Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt (2012, Nation Books) revisit the expression and update its definition to more appropriately reflect its post-Cold War identity, arguing that, in the U.S., the power to decide and to dictate geographical dispensability and ruin rests less today with the governing and military arms of the nation-state than it does within the offices of corporate America and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce insofar as the latter have been and continue to be enabled and ennobled by neoliberal pro-corporatist politics and policies at all levels of government. Sacrifice and destruction in the name of military might and 'national security' are, today, replaced by the same in the name of corporate profit. Significantly, Hedges and Sacco re-orient the scope of the sacrifice zone from the regional scale of nuclear disaster to emphasize landscapes (e.g., urban, agricultural), collectivities (e.g., communities, neighborhoods, reservations), and social groups (race, gender, ethnicity) left un- or under-explored in earlier studies; they, too, have broadened the definition of sacrifice and ruin from their ecological origins to include social destructions that are consequent to the sacrificed condition- e.g., crime, addiction, suicide, etc. In short, they have helped to introduce the concept of 'sacrifice' into the language of social and environmental justice and into the arena of critical geographical thinking and inquiry. [1] see, for example, Seth Shulman's The Threat at Home: Confronting the Toxic Legacy of the US Military [1992 Beacon Press] and Mike Davis's 'Dead West: Ecocide in Marlboro Country' [1993, New Left Review]). 'Sacrifice' (Oxford English Dictionary) The destruction or surrender of something valued or desired for the sake of something having, or regarded as having, a higher or a more pressing claim; the loss entailed by devotion to some other interest; also, the thing so devoted or surrendered. To permit injury or ruin to the interests of (a person) for the sake of some desired object. The purpose of this paper session is manifold: * to explore in more detail, using case studies, the idea and the suitability of sacrifice to critical geographical thinking and scholarship; * to identify theoretical precursors and begin the process of developing an identifiable theory of sacrifice in geography; * to explore the many institutions, faces, and facets of sacrifice as it unfolds, and has unfolded, in different places and at different spatial scales; * to explore sacrifice as central tenet (material and discursive) of neoliberalism and globalization; The goal is to emerge with a more nuanced applications and more theoretically robust understandings and interpretations of sacrifice and sacrifice zone than have been developed in past adoptions of the expressions. To this end, this cfp casts a wide net, both thematically and discursively, inviting for participation those contributions that directly speak to or are informed by the concept of 'sacrifice' in field research (case studies) and explanation/interpretation (theory-building). Please send all inquiries, abstracts, and expressions of interest to Alec Brownlow (cbrow...@depaul.edu<mailto:cbrow...@depaul.edu>) by Friday, October 5th, 2012. ********** Alec Brownlow, PhD DePaul University Department of Geography 990 W Fullerton Avenue Chicago IL 60614 773.325.7876 ________________________________
