Apologies for cross postings... Final Call For Papers: 2012 AAG Annual Meeting, New York, February 24th-28th
*Session Title: Ethnographies of Residential Property Ownership* Organizer: Stephen Boatright (CUNY Graduate Center) Residential property ownership has long been lauded by policy makers for providing physical and economic security both to households and to national economies. Since the late twentieth century the American model of homeownership—financed by long-term, relatively low-interest mortgages—has spread internationally. Neoliberal policy makers like Thatcher and de Soto have sounded the clarion call for liberal land tenure systems much as Presidents Hoover and Roosevelt did a century ago. Many developed and developing countries including Spain, Romania, Brazil, and others have homeownership rates equal or greater to those in the United States, yet, these gains in title, housing quality, and psychological well-being take different forms in different geographies, and they have often become available only through an increases in household indebtedness. The painful irony that the current multi-scaled economic crisis has issued from a rupture of the risk concealed in what was purportedly a place of personal and financial security has barely dented the popular desire for personal property ownership. What are the ideological and material practices that sustain and perpetuate the ideal of ownership in the face of ever-increasing debt? How does the tension between spatial flexibility and attachment to place play out in relation to land tenure? What are the metonymic processes that ‘resolve’ concerns about security—national, personal, political, and economic—through property ownership? Critical geographers have produced deep structural analysis of the role that individual leveraged property ownership plays in the circuits of global capital accumulation. While systemic theorization continues to be important to furthering geographic understanding of how global capital circulates through the home, this session hopes to encourage ethnographic research across multiple scales and geographical regions that explores the relationships between the material flows of capital, ideology and housing, property rights, and land tenure. Possible topics and themes: - Legal land tenure changes in emerging and developing economies - Ownership, debt, and political pacification - Financing models and the influence of global capital - Local economic development strategies and support for homeownership - Relationships between housing construction and location and individual ownership If you are interested in participating in this paper session please send a short abstract of no more than 250 words to Stephen Boatright at [email protected] by September 25th. -- Stephen Boatright Adjunct Lecturer Department of Geography and Geology Hunter College Ph.D. Student Earth and Environmental Sciences The Graduate Center, City University of New York
