AAG 2019 CFP: Finance and Environmental Crises

[Jenny Elaine Goldstein]

CFP AAG 2019, Washington DC, April 3-7, 2019
Finance and environmental crises: Disaster capitalism beyond the Shock Doctrine

Organizers: Jenny Goldstein (Cornell University), Shaina Potts (UCLA), Sarah 
Knuth (Durham University)
Sponsored by: Economic Geography Specialty Group

Twenty years following the 1998 Asian Financial Crisis and a decade after the 
2008 subprime mortgage-led crisis, what have we learned about the ways in which 
financial failures-cum-opportunities such as currency devaluations or debt 
crises intersect with environmental crises and/or less spectacular ecological 
transformations? In the decade since publication, Naomi Klein’s “disaster 
capitalism” thesis in The Shock Doctrine (2007) has become a widely-referenced 
and useful starting point for understanding how capital catalyzes “disasters”, 
usually—if not necessarily—localized and short-term, and then uses such events 
to further entrench and expand neoliberal policies. We seek papers that 
consider the ongoing salience of and/or go beyond the disaster capitalism model 
for understanding the iterative relationship between financial practices and 
environmental crises, in and beyond moments of acute financial turbulence 
(Christophers 2017, Ekers and Prudham 2015, Peet 2011). Environmental 
degradation and devaluation today, for instance, are not simply occasions for 
the spread of standard neoliberal policies to new spaces: they are equally 
significant as moments for the invention of novel financial practices and new 
forms of value creation or extraction (Knuth, Potts, and Goldstein 
forthcoming). Many questions about the relationship between finance, economic 
crises, and environmental crises remain (Bigger and Dempsey 2018, Ouma et al. 
2018). Participants might consider—but are not limited to—topics including:


  *
The role(s) of the financial sector in causing, shaping and/or taking advantage 
of environmental crises. What are the explanatory pitfalls/advantages of 
problematizing finance, versus taking on specific financial industry players 
(e.g., pension funds, sovereign wealth funds, private equity, financialized 
insurance companies) and their geographies?
  *
The temporal and spatial scales at which we consider such questions: what have 
we learned about how acute financial crises are displaced into environmental 
crises, and what important questions remain?
  *
Alternately/additionally, how might further considering the neoliberal era’s 
longer-running crisis of overaccumulation, and return of a state of generalized 
financial volatility, deepen our analysis of the finance-environment nexus?
  *
Relatedly, most applications and/or elaborations of the disaster capitalism 
thesis have explored relatively acute and localized crises, such as hurricanes, 
earthquakes and tsunamis, war/terrorist attacks, or toxic exposures (albeit 
with increasingly sophisticated understandings of how longer-term 
processes/politics such as austerity structure and are reified in such events, 
e.g. Fox Gotham and Greenberg 2014). Recently, some scholars have used the 
framework to consider more long-term, systemic destabilizations, notably 
climate change and its effects (Johnson 2017, Fletcher 2012). How is/isn’t 
disaster capitalism useful in interrogating such posited states of generalized 
“Anthropocene” volatility?
  *
Racialized finance capitalism and environmental disaster (Pulido 2016, 
Ranganathan 2016): what have we learned about how financial players exploit and 
deepen racial capitalism’s ‘everyday’ disasters and states of precarity, in and 
out of more visible and acute events? What must we still ask, and how might we 
respond?
  *
Disaster capitalism’s entangled political and cultural economies: how do 
perceptions of and narratives about crises and disaster (Roitman 2014), whether 
environmental or financial, facilitate finance capital’s expansion into new 
markets, arenas, classes, and products?
  *
The role, and ongoing salience, of austerity politics in disaster capitalism: 
how might the relationship between austerity politics and “natural” disasters 
be changing as finance capitalism and neoliberalism themselves evolve/see 
challenges?
  *
Ongoing methodological issues, and/or strategies for overcoming them: how are 
researchers and engaged scholars confronting the difficulties of exploring 
transnational financial networks and large-scale processes, very concrete and 
local effects of environmental crisis and transformations, and often 
(deliberately) opaque linkages between these levels? How do such choices matter 
in shaping/delimiting possibilities for critical scholarship and partnerships?

As we are interested in organizing a paper and a related panel session, please 
send 250 word paper abstracts *or* expressions of interest to be a panel 
participant to Jenny Goldstein 
(goldst...@cornell.edu), Shaina Potts 
(spo...@geog.ucla.edu) and/or Sarah Knuth 

REMINDER - CfP AAG 2018 Washington - Emerging Industries: : Institutions, legitimacy and system building

[Robert Hassink]

+++ Apologies for cross-posting +++

 

Please submit your abstract (max. 250 words) to Huiwen Gong
g...@geographie.uni-kiel.de  , Christian
Binz christian.b...@eawag.ch  , Robert
Hassink hass...@geographie.uni-kiel.de
  and Michaela Trippl
michaela.tri...@univie.ac.at   by
Wednesday 10th October.

We will notify authors by Wednesday October 17th.

 

 

Call for Papers

 

Annual Meeting of the American Association of Geographers, Washington, D.C.,
April 3-7, 2019

 

Emerging industries: Institutions, legitimacy and system building

 

Session Organizers: Huiwen Gong (Kiel University), Christian Binz (Swiss
Federal Institute of Aquatic Science and Technology), Robert Hassink (Kiel
University), Michaela Trippl (University of Vienna)

 

In recent decades, the emergence of internet-related, biotechnology-based
and ‘green’ industries has catalyzed significant economic development in
regions, nations and globally. Accordingly, ‘emerging’, ‘embryonic’ and
‘nascent’ industries, as well as the dynamics of industrial path creation in
regions (Fornahl et al., 2012; Grillitsch et al. 2017; Hassink et al. 2018;
MacKinnon et al. 2018), have received renewed interest in research and
policy making (e.g., Tödtling and Trippl 2018; Forbes and Kirsch, 2011; Binz
et al., 2016b; Gustafsson et al., 2016; Carvalho and Vale, 2018; York and
Lenox, 2014). Economic geographers have studied emerging industries have
from multiple perspectives, four of which stand out: evolutionary approaches
(path dependence, path creation, regional branching etc.), institutional
theory (bricolage, institutional entrepreneurship, legitimacy etc.),
organizational ecology (Gustafsson et al., 2016), as well as (regional and
technological) innovation systems.

 

While these approaches have contributed complementary insights into the
mechanisms of new industry emergence, a range of significant questions
remain unanswered, particularly concerning the institutional contexts in
which new industries form. Newly emerging industries like car sharing,
renewable energy or personalized medicine fundamentally challenge taken-for
granted regulations, norms, and cultural beliefs. As such, their emergence
and diffusion depends not only on ‘supply-side’ knowledge dynamics (which
are traditionally the focus of economic geographers), but also on structural
shifts in the relevant valuation systems and institutional structures.
Whether new industries emerge, directly depends on how early entrepreneurs
are able to alter incumbent institutional structures through collective
institutional entrepreneurship/work, legitimation or system building
activities. 

 

At the same time, economic globalization increasingly interconnects industry
actors and institutional structures in distant places. Most emerging
industries are not only confronted with institutional barriers at one
particular spatial scale (e.g. inside one city or region) anymore, but
depend on highly complex, multi-scalar institutional arrangements that may
facilitate or hinder the emergence of new technologies and practices. Where,
how and at what scale early entrepreneurs may best intervene in these
multi-scalar arrangements is a largely open research question.  

 

Moreover, whilst recent scholars, informed by institutional theories in
other disciplines, have started to pay increasing attention to the role of
agency in institutional dynamics, such as institutional entrepreneurship
(Sotarauta and Mustikkamäki, 2015), and multi-actor legitimacy building
(Bergek et al., 2008; Geels and Verhees, 2011), for emerging technologies
and nascent industries, fundamental issues such as the institutional logics
behind such agencies, and the interplay between materiality and legitimacy
dynamics in space, remain poorly understood.

 

This session therefore aims at bringing together scholars who analyze the
emergence of new industries from an institutional perspective and at several
spatial scales (regional, national, global). We welcome conceptual,
methodological and empirical papers that examine the topics of multi-scalar
institutional agencies, institutional entrepreneurship, as well as
legitimation and valuation dynamics, which are relevant for the emergence of
new industries. We see particular potential in tackling the following
questions: 

 

n  What multi-scalar institutional arrangements hinder or support the
creation of new industrial paths in a given region/country? Why do new
industrial paths succeed in certain institutional contexts while they fail
in others? (Coenen et al., 2012; Hansen and Coenen, 2015)

n  In nascent sectors, what kinds of institutional work are necessary in
order to create, maintain and disrupt the institutional arrangements that
the emerging industries are embedded in? (Fuenfschilling and Truffer, 2016;
Hampel et al., 2017; Lawrence et al., 2013)

n 

AAG CfP Debt: Coping, Supporting, Overcoming, Resisting and Enduring

[Kear, Mark Thomas Fraser - (mkear)]

AAG 2019, Washington, D.C. 3rd-7th April 2019
Debt: Coping, Supporting, Overcoming, Resisting and Enduring

The reallocation of risk from collective institutions and employers to 
households and individuals is producing forms of financial insecurity not well 
captured by conventional metrics of poverty and inequality. This downward 
distribution of social risk is also productive of new markets, financial 
practices, and, along with them, spiraling levels of debt. This session seeks 
papers examining coping strategies and practices of mutual support arising in 
response to conditions of indebtedness.

Our interpretation of “debt” is broad, encompassing its personal, state and 
social forms. We also understand debt as relational – not only with respect to 
debtor-creditor relations – but also in connection with broader social 
processes that cross scales and borders, including evictions, low quality work 
and unemployment, heightened precarity, failing state social support networks, 
and migration.

We are interested in alternative frameworks of mutual solidarity, dependency 
and obligation developed and maintained to sustain life. These might include: 
existing and new types of social networks, collective forms of practice that 
are ‘quiet’, hospitality networks and broader narratives of ‘sanctuary’, local 
organisation of pro-bono and peer-to-peer legal advice, and new types of 
economic provisioning.

We invite papers exploring the creation, maintenance, as well as failure, of 
mutual support and the plural methods through which individuals and groups 
endure and potentially enact change in broader political, social and legal 
arenas. We also invite papers that take a critical perspective on the 
relationship between mutual aid and the circumstances – colonial and state 
violence, political-economic crises – that necessitate its expansion.

Please submit your abstract (max. 250 words) to Christopher Harker 
(christopher.har...@ucl.ac.uk), Mark Kear 
(mk...@email.arizona.edu) and Richard Johnson 
(rljohn...@email.arizona.edu) by October 
21, 2018.


Mark Kear PhD | Assistant Professor
School of Geography and Development
University of Arizona
ENR2 Building, Room S515
P.O. Box 210137
Tucson, Az 85721