*Apologies for Multiple Cross-Listings*
Call for Papers: AAG Meeting, April 8-12, 2014 Session Title: Putting the Sacrifice in Sacrifice Zones Organizers: Alec Brownlow, Dept. of Geography, DePaul University, cbrow...@depaul.edu; Harold Perkins, Dept. of Geography, Ohio University, perki...@ohio.edu Sacrifice zones are increasingly well-documented, yet persistently under-theorized. Typical accounts of sacrifice zones include industrial, extractive, or military activities that render certain locations dangerous for communities who do not reap the rewards of those damaging activities. Occupants made to suffer are predominantly ethnic and racial minorities, though increasingly there is awareness in environmental justice studies that sacrifice zones are also correlated with lower class white communities, too. While the primary scale at which sacrifice is documented is the region, areas as small as individual urban neighborhoods are also considered sacrificed. Thus sacrifice as a spatial concept includes everything on a scalar continuum from something as large and nebulous as Appalachia to something as small and specific as the Manchester neighborhood in Houston, Texas. A common narrative throughout these varying accounts is the idea that human health and environmental quality in individualized contexts are 'given up' for the betterment of some much larger whole, often society or the economy broadly defined. Examples include energy production, jobs, economic expansion, and militarization. These are but a few of the reasons why a 'few people in some far flung location' are harmed in the name of 'progress for everyone'. Certainly these kinds of accounts of sacrifice zones have been crucial to the success of the environmental justice movement and have provided those who study environmental justice in academia much to consider. However, in this paper session we seek to build on these contributions to expand our understanding of the geographies of sacrifice. Specifically, we are keen to include papers in this session that further theorize the notion of sacrifice in relation to the spatiality of sacrifice zones. Rather than a flat ontology of sacrifice zones as bounded/discreet regions, this session is aimed at elaborating how sacrifice is produced, legitimated, contested, and even de-centered discursively and materially through space and time. In other words, how is sacrifice made spatially explicit through the everyday and extraordinary events that unfold and make up our lives in a predominantly capitalist world. In keeping, we seek papers that push beyond the commonly understood spatialities of sacrifice and in so doing elucidate how the notion of sacrifice pervades our existence and how its specter is imbued in commonsense notions of our world and our place in it. By extension we are interested in papers that explore how the notion of sacrifice is constitutive of, and potentially subversive to, hegemonic socio-political formations under capitalism. Theoretically innovative topics are especially welcome. Topics may include, but are certainly not limited to: 1. Sacrifice and the (laboring, sick, gendered) bodily/family scale 2. Sacrifice and its role in the formation of capitalist hegemony; and/or sacrifice and the struggle toward non-capitalist counter-hegemonies 3. Sacrifice and (social, political, cultural) identity 4. Considerations of sacrifice as a multi-scalar process of production and consumption 5. Labor politics in relation to the concept of sacrifice. 6. The 'everyday' in relation to sacrifice/ living in a sacrifice zone 7. Sacrifice and the exercise of state power (military, economic expansion, etc) 8. Collective versus individualized notions of sacrifice and their political import. 9. Sacrifice in relation to various forms of environmental governance. 10. Sacrifice, sovereignty, and bare life If you are interested in participating in this session, please notify us (cbrow...@depaul.edu or perki...@ohio.edu) of your interest and tentative title as soon as possible, and send an abstract by October 31st. Accepted participants will then be expected to register and submit their abstracts online at the AAG website by to November 15th, 2014 so there is sufficient time to register the session. ********** Alec Brownlow Associate Professor DePaul University Department of Geography 990 W Fullerton Avenue Chicago IL 60614 773.325.7876 "Hell is an idea first born on an undigested apple dumpling ..." (Melville)
