Call for Papers: Animating Geopolitics
Annual Meeting of the Association of American Geographers (AAG), Los Angeles, April 9-13, 2013 
Session Organizer: Juanita Sundberg, University of British Columbia, [log in to unmask] 

 This session extends recent calls to revitalize, “re-naturalize,” or materialize political geography and critical geopolitics (Braun 2010; Robinson 2010; Sundberg 2011; Thrift 2000). Such efforts come at a time when geographers are documenting how nation-states increasingly enlist biophysical entities – deserts, seas, islands – to accomplish boundary enforcement goals (Nevins 2008; Sundberg 2011; Mountz 2011; Mountz and Hiemstra 2012). In these scenarios, nature is instrumentalized to short circuit politics (Latour 56), with horrific consequences for migrants and asylum seekers. 

What theoretical and methodological tools are needed to think critically and productively about how biophysical entities matter to geopolitical arrangements and outcomes without naturalizing the nation-state or nature? Given the historical tendency for state agents to call upon the natural environment to rationalize or justify the organization of socio-economic and political life (Bassin 2003), this question demands new responses. While geo-deterministic arguments have been roundly criticized for attempting to justify political choices on the basis of “supposedly uncontroversial pre-existing geographical objects” (Fall 2005: 16), political geography displays ambivalence about treating nature as something more than a discursive construction, backdrop for geopolitical affairs or instrument of enforcement. As political geography sidelined the environmental determinism of the past, wherein “a causal arrow was seen as running from the physical environment to political outcomes” (Agnew, Mitchell and Ó Tuathail 2003: 7), the geopolitical landscape has been evacuated of all but its human actors.  

This session invites theoretically informed and empirically based papers that revitalize and embody geopolitics to account more fully for the ways in which nonhumans/organic life matter to the workings of power (Barad 2003; Frost and Coole 2010; Hobson 2007). 
Possible paper topics might include (but are not limited to): 
•	Elaborating tools to both account for nature/materiality while problematizing claims that geopolitical arrangements and outcomes result from nature
•	Analyzing the challenges and promises of “new materialism” for theories of geopolitics 
•	Outlining methodological tools for studying how organic processes of life matter to the workings of geopower
•	Exploring the onto-epistemological implications of posthumanism for a critical geopolitics

Please send inquiries/abstracts of no more than 250 words to Juanita Sundberg at [log in to unmask] no later than October 17, 2012. 

References
Agnew, J., K. Mitchell and G. Toal. 2003. Introduction. In A Companion to Political Geography eds. J. Agnew, K. Mitchell, and G. Toal, 1-10. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers Ltd. 
Barad, K. 2003. Posthumanist performativity: toward an understanding of how matter comes to matter. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 28(3): 801-831.
Bassin, M. 2003. Politics from Nature: Environment, Ideology and the Determinist Tradition. In J. Agnew, K. Mitchell, and G. Toal, eds. A Companion to Political Geography, pp.13-29. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers Ltd. 
Braun, B. 2008. Theorizing the Nature-Society Divide. In K. Cox, L. Murray, and J. Robinson, eds. The SAGE Handbook of Political Geography, pp. 189-204. London: SAGE Publications Ltd.
Fall, J. 2005. Drawing the line: nature, hybridity and politics in transboundary spaces. Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing Co.
Frost, S. and D. Coole. 2010. New Materialisms: Ontology, Ethics, and Politics. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Hobson, K. 2007. Political Animals? On animals as subjects in an enlarged political geography. Political Geography 26: 250-267.
Latour, B. 2004. Politics of nature: how to bring the sciences into democracy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Mountz, A. and N. Hiemstra. 2012. Spatial Strategies for Rebordering Human Migration at Sea. In T. Wilson and H. Donnan, eds. Companion to Border Studies, pp. 455-473. Blackwell Publishers, Ltd. 
Mountz, A. 2011. The enforcement archipelago: Detention, haunting, and asylum on islands. Political Geography 30(3): 118-128. 
Nevins, J. 2008. Dying to Live: a story of US immigration in an age of global apartheid. San Francisco, CA: City Lights Publishers.
Robinson, J. 2007. Introduction, Re-Naturing Political Geography.  In K. Cox, L. Murray, and J. Robinson, eds. The SAGE Handbook of Political Geography, pp. 185-188. London: SAGE Publications Ltd.
Sundberg, J. 2011. Diabolic Caminos in the Desert & Cat Fights on the Río: A post-humanist political ecology of boundary enforcement in the United States-Mexico borderlands, Annals of the Association of American Geographers 101(2): 318-336.
Thrift, N. 2000. It’s the Little Things. In K. Dodds and D. Atkinson, eds. Geopolitical traditions: a century of geopolitical thought. New York, NY: Routledge.