Final CFP AAG 2013: Sacrifice Zones
** Apologies for Cross-Posting ** One more paper is sought to complete two paper sessions on the topic of Sacrifice Zones at next year's AAG Meeting in Los Angeles. Please send all inquiries, abstracts, or questions to Alec Brownlow (cbrow...@depaul.edumailto:cbrow...@depaul.edu) by Wednesday October 17th. The cfp appears below. Sacrifice Zones Call for Papers: 2013 Annual AAG Meeting, Los Angeles, CA April 9-13, 2013 '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 expression, Sacrifice Zone, has been widely applied to identify and describe those geographies (environments, landscapes, regions) poisoned, destroyed, and forever alienated in the wake of decades of macroscale resource extraction (e.g., mountain top removal in West Virginia) and experimentation (e.g., nuclear production and testing during the Cold War).[i] The expression suggests the politics and the geographies of disposability and expendability 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 and violence in the name of ideological hegemony qua corporate profit, industrial and technological innovation, and military strength. The purpose of this paper session is to revisit the concept of the Sacrifice Zone in an attempt to thoughtfully and critically broaden its identity beyond its environmental origins and to more fully consider and debate its applicability to social injustices existing at different scales (from the global to the body) and in different places, spaces, and locations in this age of expanding austerity, identity politics, disinvestment, and economic mobility. What, in essence, constitute the 'new' geographies of sacrifice? 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.edumailto:cbrow...@depaul.edu) by Wednesday, October 17th, 2012. [i] see, for example, Shulman, S. 1992. The Threat at Home: Confronting the Toxic Legacy of the US Military. Beacon Press; Davis, M. 1993. 'Dead West: Ecocide in Marlboro Country'. New Left Review 49-73; Fox, J. 1999. Mountaintop Removal in West Virginia: an Environmental Sacrifice Zone.' Organization Environment 12:163-183.
Sustainable Tourism and Resilient Tourism - AAG, Los Angeles Meeting, April 2013
CALL FOR ABSTRACTS -- RTS Sessions for the AAG, Los Angeles Meeting, April 2013 *Sustainable Tourism and Resilient Tourism* * * Resilience has become increasingly significant as a way of addressing the urgent needs of communities in today's rapidly changing world. While some consider resilience as a feature of sustainability, other consider it as a major departure. The latter argument, for example, sees sustainability as trying to prevents climate change, and resilience as trying to adapt to changes. In addition,resilience has two major approaches. The first, and better known, approach has a focus on large catastrophic events, such as a tsunami or economic crash. An alternative approach seeks to understand how people and communities deal with slow, gradual changes over time, such as rises in sea level or changing job markets. The latter approach has been referred to as evolutionary resilience, persistent resilience, and transitional resilience (among other terms). This has significant ties to sustainable community development to the degree that each has a focus on capacity building and institutional learning. This session explores all of these perspectives in the context of tourism communities. Papers are welcome that expand our understanding of sustainable tourism and of tourism and resilience, both at the large scale disaster level, and as the day-to-day survival level. Papers that interface between the two concepts of sustainability and resilience are also welcome, though not required. Let me know if you have any questions about this session. Please submit abstracts to the session organizer, Alan A. Lew, Northern Arizona University, alan@nau.edu, no later than October 17. (See full abstract submission instructions at the top of this webpage.) This session is cosponsored by the Tourism Commission of the International Geographical Union. For all of the AAG-RTS Sponsored Sessions for the AAG, please visit: http://www.geog.nau.edu/rts/sessions/2013.html *Alan A. Lew* http://alanlew.com/*, Ph.D., AICP* Professor and Graduate Program Coordinator Department of Geography, Planning and Recreation http://nau.edu/gpr Northern Arizona University, Flagstaff, Arizona 86011-5016, USA * *Publications* * *Tourism Geographies http://tgjournal.com/* - journal Editor-in-Chief * *World Regional Geography: Human Mobilities, Tourism Destinations Sustainable Environments http://www.wrgeography.com/* * *Understanding Managing Tourism Impacts*http://www.routledge.com/books/details/9780415771337/ * My open access articles http://www.geog.nau.edu/publications/index.html + GScholar http://bit.ly/vvfljL *** *IGU Tourism Commission-related Conferences http://tourismgeography.com* * Recreation, Tourism Sport Specialty Group http://www.geog.nau.edu/rts/, AAG Annual Meeting, 9-13 April 2013, Los Angeles, California, USA * Coastal, Island and Tropical Tourismhttp://geog.nau.edu/igust/sabah2013/, 16-18 April 2013, Kota Kinabalu, Sabah, Malaysia * Sustainable Tourism in Urban Environmentshttp://www.geog.nau.edu/igust/hk2012/, 8-10 May 2013, Hong Kong * IGU Tourism Commission Pre-Conference, 28 July-3 Aug 2013, Beppu, Japan * IGU Regional Conference, 4-9 July 2013, Kyoto, Japan * Emerging Landscapes and Frontiers in Tourism Researchhttp://geog.nau.edu/igust/china2013/, 20-22 September 2013, Kanas N.P., Xinjiang, China * * Research Associate, Centre for Innovative Planning and Development, Faculty of Built Environment, Universiti Teknologi Malaysia * My Blogs: @alew on Twitter http://twitter.com/alew * TG Tourism Placehttp://tourismplace.blogspot.com/ * Travelography http://bit.ly/travelography * * NAU GPR on Facebook http://bit.ly/GPR-FB -and Twitterhttp://twitter.com/NAUGPR http://twitter.com/NAUGPR* Online GPR Studies http://nau.edu/gprweb * *Change is inevitable, except from a vending machine.* *
AAG 2013: Call for contributions: The production of nature
Apologies for cross-postings. Please circulate widely. Call for contributions: Annual Meeting of the Association of American Geographers, Los Angeles, 9–13 April, 2013. *The production of nature* Sponsored by the Animal Geography Specialty Group, the Cultural and Political Ecology Specialty Group, and the Socialist and Critical Geography Specialty Group. Organizers: Freyja Knapp, University of California, Berkeley Mazen Labban, Rutgers University *We dedicate this session to the memory of Neil Smith, 1954–2012.* For millennia people have employed microorganisms in productive activities ranging from making beer and bread to extracting gold and silver. The design and deployment of microbial processes for productive purposes, however, has expanded rapidly in recent decades. Advances in biochemistry, molecular biology and genetics have produced a plethora of microorganisms capable of performing productive functions across a wide variety of activities, and have supported the engineering of new microbial processes in agriculture, medicine, manufacturing, mineral and hydrocarbon extraction, environmental bioremediation, and energy production, to name the most prominent examples. Such deployments of biotechnology have attracted increasing attention from geographers and others studying their economic, (geo)political and ethical implications. Besides the laboratory studies that have been developed in great detail within science and technology studies, critical studies of biotechnology have largely remained confined to the agricultural, pharmaceutical and biomedical industries. The expansion of biotechnologies in other fields and the enrollment of microbial labor in new production regimes, however, raise broader questions concerning nature-space-society and are therefore ripe for critical analysis. We seek studies of the creative role of microorganisms in the extraction of materials and energy that employ a broad understanding of extraction beyond extractive industry proper and that revisit critically the production of nature thesis: production of nature as production by nature. Some of the questions that we have been entertaining are: how does the work of microorganisms articulate with human labor in extractive activities? What is the contribution of microbial forms of life to the production and circulation of value in extractive processes, and what are the effects of the use of microorganisms on our understanding of labor exploitation? What political, economic and spatial determinations—past, ongoing or imminent determinations—give rise to the employment of microbial work in extractive production? What are the effects of such uses on the materiality (spatio-temporality) of extraction and the spatio-temporal rhythms of capital accumulation? What role does microbial production/reproduction play in the greening of industrial processes? What are the temporal and scalar frictions between microbial processes and human production systems? We offer those questions to stimulate and provoke, and we invite others. We are particularly interested in research that problematizes the boundaries between extraction and other forms of productive activity, biologically based production and non-biologically based production, human and nonhuman production systems. The session format will depend on the responses we get—we welcome research papers as well as shorter essays: research proposals, critical reflections, ideas. Please send expression of interest, inquiries and abstracts to Freyja Knapp (fre...@berkeley.edu) and Mazen Labban (lab...@rci.rutgers.edu) by Monday, October 22. Mazen Labban Visiting Assistant Professor Department of Geography Rutgers University Lucy Stone Hall 54 Joyce Kilmer Avenue Piscataway, NJ 08854-8045 lab...@rci.rutgers.edu http://rutgers.academia.edu/Labban Senior Editor Capitalism Nature Socialism http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rcns20
