Very Final Call for Papers for the American Association of Geographers Annual Meeting April 10 - 14, 2018, New Orleans, LA

[Stefan Ouma]

 

Apologies, again, for cross-posting.

 

 

 

Very Final Call for Papers for the American Association of Geographers
Annual Meeting April 10 - 14, 2018, New Orleans, LA

 

 

Researching dis/articulations of Globalized Production

 

Sponsored by 

Geographies of Food and Agriculture Group

Economic Geography Speciality Group 

Geographic Perspectives on Women Speciality Group 

 

 

Organizers: Siobhan McGrath (University of Durham), Stefan Ouma (University
of Frankfurt), Marion Werner (SUNY-Buffalo)

Please send name, affiliation and abstracts to Stefan Ouma (
 o...@geo.uni-frankfurt.de) by October
20th. Contributors will be notified October 21th.

 

Originally coined as a critical approach to analyze the incorporation of
labor and commodities into far-flung organizational structures for the
production and redistribution of surplus value in world-historical
perspective (Wallerstein and Hopkins 1986), global commodity chains have
morphed into something else. They have become "value chains," a tool of
market-oriented development policy used to foster the market integration of
firms, farms and labor in the Global South (Werner, Bair & Fernandez 2014;
Neilson 2014; McMichael 2013).

The enthusiastic uptake of the value chain approach among development
researchers and practitioners has tended to be blind to the distributional
injustices, experiences of exploitation, environmental destruction and
multiple producer risks that come along with integration into global
markets, as well as the coloniality of power and being that sustains these.
Such dark sides of globalized production have recently been given a more
prominent role in the literature by invoking the concept of disarticulations
(Bair/Werner 2011; Bair et al. 2013; Argent 2016; McGrath 2017). The concept
makes a call for moving beyond presentist, often celebratory, accounts of
value chain inclusion towards an analytical focus on uneven development:
i.e., forms of devaluation, disinvestment and displacement that make value
chains possible (Bair/Werner 2011; Werner 2016).

 

Critical literatures have explored these negatives of value production,
including labor devaluation (Werner 2016; McGrath 2017),
dispossession/enclosures (Murray/Chandler/Overton 2011; Ince 2014), crisis
(Ouma 2015), and ruins (Tsing 2015). More recently, leading scholars of the
value chain/global production network field have also picked up on some of
these elements (e.g., Coe/Yeung 2015), and others are using a range of
methods, including large surveys, to consider dynamics of uneven development
such as social stratification (Maertens/Swinnen 2009). When taken up in this
mainstream literature, however, disarticulations are largely framed as
empirical outcomes of a given set of local and network conditions,
diminishing the analytical potential of the approach.

This panel focuses on the methodological challenge of accounting for the
multi-scalar and multi-temporal processes through which commodity chains
serve as mechanisms of uneven development. We welcome papers that explore
the following questions: To what extent can attending to the dark sides
through a disarticulations perspective allow us to move beyond empiricist
findings towards empirically-informed theoretical insights? Can approaching
commodity chains in this way help to reveal the dynamics of these
power-laden and heterogeneous assemblages which are co-constituted through
the production of difference (e.g. "gender", "race", "class", "age",
"citizenship")? What is the place of situated knowledge, positionality and
politics in our methodologies? How do researchers navigate the
differentiated and often conflict-ridden spaces of capital, labor and local
communities entangled with global commodity chains ? How might critical
perspectives on development, including decolonisation, produce more
progressive methodologies? How might historical methodological tools and
critical quantitative methods aid in our understanding of contemporary
processes of disarticulations in commodity production? How can these studies
inform social justice-oriented politics?

Please send name, affiliation and abstracts to Stefan Ouma (
 o...@geo.uni-frankfurt.de) by October
20th. 

 

 

---

Dr. Stefan Ouma | Assistant Professor in Economic Geography | Department of
Human Geography |
Goethe University Frankfurt am Main | PEG Buildung |Theodor W.--Adorno-Platz
6 | 60629 Frankfurt | GERMANY

 

Currently in Dar es Salaam, Fon: +255 743 202 145

 

 

CfP AAG 2018 - Geographies of Climate Change Mitigation: Marketization, Financialization, and Decarbonization

[Mark Cooper]

Session:  Geographies of Climate Change Mitigation:  Marketization, 
Financialization, and Decarbonization

Organizers: Mark Cooper (Lund University / University of California, Davis)
Wim Carton (Lund University)
John Chung-En Liu (Occidental College)

Discussants: Jennifer Rice (University of Georgia)
[second discussant t.b.a.]

The ratification of the Paris Agreement marked a new direction for climate 
governance.  In contrast to the Kyoto Protocol, the Paris Agreement employs a 
bottom-up approach centered on coordinated, cooperative, multi-scalar 
activities. The Paris climate regime is not only likely to encourage an 
assortment of strategies for governing greenhouse gas emissions, but will 
implicate a new set of sites, scales, and actors in the mitigation of climate 
change. These emerging forms of emissions governance offer the potential for 
new forms of collaboration and social change, but will also bring new tensions 
and conflicts.

This growing diversity of strategies, sites, scales, and actors in climate 
mitigation necessitates that we diversify our theoretical, empirical, and 
analytical approaches, but also that we build new analyses and explanations 
that cohere across cases, places, and processes. Drawing inspiration from 
Bridge et al.’s (2013) analysis of energy transitions, the geographies of 
climate change mitigation can be said to entail: activities within or across 
specific territories and economies, the structural and contextual processes 
that condition mitigation activities, and the generation of new – and uneven – 
geographies through these activities.

By examining the geographies of climate governance we hope to engage some of 
the most pressing issues around climate change and society:  What form does 
mitigation take in particular places, and how can we make sense of the 
development and effect of particular mitigation activities? What roles do 
different actors and governance structures play in these activities? How do the 
priorities of different actors align or conflict at different scales? What new 
geographical trends for mitigation are emerging within the Paris regime?

We aim to organize one or more sessions that bring together critical 
perspectives on climate change mitigation and the role of markets, finance, and 
regulation in efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and decarbonize 
economies. Our aim is for these sessions to bring together perspectives on both 
the Global North and Global South, to highlight the intertwined character of 
geographically differentiated processes, and to explore new ways of analyzing 
and theorizing climate change mitigation. Paper topics could include, but are 
not limited to:

– Compliance-based policy instruments such as carbon taxes and cap-and-trade
– Programs that encourage the economization of greenhouse gas emissions and the 
development of low-carbon economies
– Non-state governance programs including private standards and sector 
initiatives
– Carbon offsetting and offset programs such as CDM and REDD+
– Climate finance and investment in low-carbon development
– The role of economists, policy advisors, private sector actors, and NGOs in 
the development, implementation, function, or contestation of mitigation 
programs
– The political economy and politics of greenhouse gas mitigation and 
decarbonization within particular territories or sectors
– Perspectives on climate justice and responsibility for mitigation post-Paris, 
and processes of uneven development in the implementation of mitigation 
programs.

To aid the discussants for this session, presenters will be asked to submit a 
written paper several weeks before the conference.

Please email abstracts (up to 250 words) to Mark Cooper 
(mark.coo...@svet.lu.se) by October 21st. We 
will confirm participation by October 23rd.