Dr. Sara Fregonese
British Academy Post-Doctoral Fellow
Department of Geography
Royal Holloway, University of London
Egham, Surrey - TW20 0EX - UK
E-mail: [log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]>
Telephone: +44 (0)1784 276 291
http://www.gg.rhul.ac.uk/Fregonese/index.htm
***Apologies for cross-posting***
Call For Papers
2010 Association of American Geographers (AAG) Annual Meeting
Washington, D.C., April 14-18, 2010
Change or continuity? Obama’s ‘new beginning’ and geographies of urban violence in the Muslim world.
Organisers: Sara Fregonese (Royal Holloway, University of London) and Adam Ramadan (University of Cambridge).
The ways the representation and the materiality of cities shape discourses and practices of violence have attracted attention in the past decade. The Middle Eastern (often Muslim) city has been theorised in urban geopolitics and political geography as a particular target of military operations and urbicidal destruction, justified by discourses of war on terror typical of the Bush years. Baghdad, Fallujah, Gaza and Beirut are only a few recent examples of discursively demonised and consequently attacked cities in the Muslim world.
On June 4 2009, newly elected Barack Obama called for ‘a new beginning’ in relations between the US and Muslims communities around the world. The new geopolitics of responsibility and mutual respect outlined by Obama would mark a sharp departure from the ‘colonial present’ of the Bush era.
This session invites reflections on the new geopolitical discourses of the Obama era and assessments of their (changing?) material consequences and their relationships with geographies of violence in Middle Eastern and Muslim cities. The session searches for changes and continuities between the Bush and Obama eras, in representations of Middle Eastern and Muslim spaces and actions deriving from them. Finally, it questions potential spaces of exclusion from Obama’s new geopolitical vision of the Muslim world and its material consequences.
Papers are welcome within the following themes:
- Geographies of violence in the post-Bush Muslim city
- Emerging actors and networks of urban warfare and contestation
- The production of new targets
- The role of the city in US military doctrine and operations
- Representations of the Muslim city in official geopolitics
- Popular geopolitics of the post-Bush Muslim city
- Change or continuity in Obama’s ‘new beginning’
- Ongoing urbicides: excluded, left behind, unchanged spaces in today’s Muslim city
- The implications of Obama’s geopolitical discursive shift for the conceptual and geopolitical value of urbicide
Please submit an abstract following the guidelines http://www.aag.org/annualmeetings/2010/papers.htm#abstracts to Sara Fregonese ([log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]>) or Adam Ramadan ([log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]>) by 12 October 2009.
<http://www.gg.rhul.ac.uk/Fregonese/index.htm>
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