Call for Papers
Association of American Geographers (AAG) Annual Meeting, Washington DC
April 14-18, 2010
Marketization and its discontents
Session organisers: Christian Berndt (University of Frankfurt), Marc
Boeckler (University of Mainz), Peter Lindner (University of Frankfurt)
Half a century of radical market orientation under neoliberal policy
programs and radical critique of the market as a capitalist device for
uneven accumulation processes notwithstanding, our knowledge of the
fragility of market arrangements remains very limited. Reactions to the
current economic crisis illustrate this very well. Mainstream economists
appear to have been caught completely wrong-footed, wondering “how [they]
got it so wrong” (Krugman 2009) whereas from a political economy point of
view the current situation serves as yet another empirical evidence for the
crisis tendencies besetting capitalism. Approaching the market from a god’s
eyes view, both positions have little to say about how concrete markets are
continuously stabilized, maintained and reshaped or retreat, fail and fall
apart.
To broaden our understanding of the assemblage and disassemblage of markets
is the central concern of this session. It conceives of marketization (1) as
arrangements of people, things and socio-technical devices that format
products, prices, competition, places of exchange and mechanisms of control;
(2) as a deeply ambivalent endeavor, never complete and always prone to
failure, variably establishing linkages and cutting others; (3) as an
inherently uneven process, incorporating and expelling places, people and
things, exposing existing socio-material relations to new structures of
inclusion and exclusion, poverty and wealth; (4) as an innately geographical
project, relying on ongoing differentiations between market outside and
inside and creating contested borderlands which are always subject to
reassessment and reconfiguration.
In this context our aim is to attract contributions which address critical
junctures in the making of markets where established linkages break, devices
fail to work, competition ends, places of exchange collapse and new spaces
for arguments about the legitimate boundaries of markets open up. Possible
topics may include but are not restricted to:
*Public discourse: What crisis, whose crisis?
*Political battles: Re-negotiating the limits of marketization and
commodification
*Locating economic crises: places and devices of demarketization
*Case studies on the disassemblage of markets
*Frontier regions of marketization as fields of struggle about the
legitimacy of markets
*Demarketization and new borderlands of global capitalism
*Ruptures and adjustments between markets and market models
*Calculative spaces and the limits of calculation
*The critical dynamics of virtual market places
*From “market failure” to the “failure of (neoclassical) economics”
*The diversity of demarketization
*Heterodox theorizing of the market and its other
Interested participants should send expressions of interest, questions
and/or title and abstract of 250 words or less to Christian Berndt
([log in to unmask]), Marc Boeckler
([log in to unmask]) or Peter Lindner
([log in to unmask]) by October 21st 2009.
The AAG website http://www.aag.org provides more information about the
annual meeting. Accepted papers will need to be registered online (paper
title and short abstract of no more than 250 words and with 3 keywords).
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