2010 AAG CFP
(In)secure space: Security, dissent, and the geographies of contemporary
urban social struggles
In the last decade scholars of security have noted a shift away from the
policing of criminal populations and toward the securitization of city
spaces. During the same period a vast array of protests, riots, and other
demonstrations based on the occupation of urban space have emerged in a
wide range of geographical contexts. Alongside, and in opposition to the
development of the new spatial governmentalities based in a biopolitics of
threat, activists and militants are developing new strategies and tactics
to subvert contemporary forms of social control and create new spaces of
social struggle. From the proliferation of post-9/11 technologies for
socio-spatial control, to anarchist and poor people’s direct actions;
from community policing to the racialized abandonment of whole
neighborhoods; from the proliferation of private security forces in
ostensibly public space, to protest permits, free speech zones, and the
rising figure of urban insurrection; the spatial configurations of security
and dissent are in flux at a wide variety of scales. . This session seeks
to explore the contours of the new socio-spatialities of security and
dissent in a manner that goes beyond liberal critique. By questioning
binaries such as public/private, free speech/terrorism,
universal/particular, local/global, this session will encourage radical
analyses of contemporary urban social struggles.
The format will be a paper session followed by a panel discussion.
Empirical and/ or theoretical contributions are welcome.
Possible topics include but are not limited to the following:
-the relationship between anti-imperialist insurgency in Iraq, Afganistan
etc and domestic movements and security/policing programs
-the circulation of strategies and tactics between social movements
-alliance politics in the face of state repression
-the politics of ‘free speech zones’ and protest permits
-the spaces and imaginaries of the city in the age of ‘less-lethal’
security technologies such as tasers, sonic weapons, and rubber bullets
-the spatialities of contemporary protest events
-squatting, occupations, and the creation of liberated zones
-the relationship between capitalist crisis and social movements
-state anxiety over the specter of resurgent Left activism
-relations between radical and progressive groups in the age of Obama
-street politics and policing
-the relations between neoliberalism, crisis, and insurrectionary discourse
and action
-class composition, race, and antagonism in the present moment
-the geographies of violence, direct action, and sabotage
For more information, or to submit an abstract for this paper session
please contact Nathan Clough at [log in to unmask]
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Nathan L. Clough
Ph.D. candidate
Dept. of Geography
The University of Minnesota
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