This is a final call for papers for this session.
Call for Papers: Geographies of Intelligence.
Call for Papers, Association of American Geographers 2011, Seattle, USA
April 12-16, 2011
Organisers: Jeremy Crampton (Georgia State University) and Trevor Barnes
(University of British Columbia).
Session jointly sponsored by the Political Geography Specialty Group and the
Historical Geography Specialty Group.
News headlines this year were much dominated by two stories: WikiLeaks, a
stateless organization dedicated to publishing governmental secrets relating
to corruption and coverups. As such, it publishes sensitive state
intelligence, and much of the attention it received this year focused on the
“War Diary” which were published simultaneously in three different
newspapers. These War Diaries provided one of the few glimpses into US
intelligence and its part in the prosecution of war. They were also
extremely controversial, raising issues of free speech, state secrets,
endangerment of troops and the nature of intelligence in a democracy.
The same month the Diaries were published, the Washington Post published the
results of a two-year analysis of what it called “top-secret America”
revealing that it is spread across at least 10,000 different US locations
and that it employs some 854,000 people with top-secret security clearances.
Geography, and geographers, are heavily involved in the production of
geographical intelligence, known as GEOINT. What does this involve? What
technologies are deployed (GIS, mapping and remote sensing) for what
purposes? What are the networks of intelligence, resources and sources of
information? How is information shared between countries? In Trevor Paglen’s
words, what is going on in the “blank spots on the map?” Perhaps not
surprisingly, remarkably little is known about geographies of intelligence,
but as both WikiLeaks and the Post story illustrate, this need not be the
case. Intelligence can be related to, but is not the same as, war, and
geographers such as Derek Gregory, Colin Flint and Michael Heffernan have
contributed to our knowledge. Additionally, as records are declassified (eg
for the OSS and CIA) the nature of intelligence can be traced for events
that played defining roles in history, such as the Second World War or
Vietnam. In these cases, geographers often staffed the intelligence desks.
This session invites contributions on the broad issue of intelligence and
its geographies. We are interested in papers that trace both contemporary
and historical aspects of this question. Topics may include but are not
limited to:
• Intelligence and terrorism
• Networks of intelligence/intelligent networks
• Geographers and GEOINT
• Geographers and foreign policy/area studies
• Covert landscapes/sites–where is intelligence produced?
• Intelligence “in the field”
• The role of state geographical secrets in a democracy
• WikiLeaks: a danger or the next generation of journalism?
• The historical emergence of centralized intelligence gathering in
different countries
• Intelligence, the military, and the state
• In what ways does intelligence characterize territory, terrain or
populations?
• Human Terrain Systems (HTS) and embedded geographers/geographies
• Critical historical moments in the production of geographic intelligence
• How has involvement in intelligence been reflected back in the disciplines
of geography and cartography?
• The role of geospatial technologies (GIS, cartography, remote sensing) in
intelligence
• Geographic intelligence, declassification and FOIA
• Cryptanalysis
In addition to registering your abstract for the conference on the AAG
website, please submit an abstract and Presenter Identification Number (PIN)
to either Jeremy Crampton ([log in to unmask]) or Trevor Barnes
([log in to unmask]) no later than 12th October 2010.
--
Jeremy W. Crampton
Editor, Cartographica
Associate Professor & Graduate Director, Geography
Dept. of Geosciences
Georgia State University
(404) 413-5771
[log in to unmask]
My new book: Mapping, A Critical Introduction to Cartography and GIS. 2010
(Wiley-Blackwell)
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