Session title:
Critical geographies of the home(land): (in)security, violence, everyday life
Organizers:
Sara Hughes, UCLA
Maegan Miller, CUNY
Outline of topic/background:
The securitization of everyday life has attracted increasing academic attention in recent years. These processes--exacerbated, but not invented by the events of 9/11--are marked by the intensification and convergence of policing and military apparatuses, surveillance and profiling technologies, urban fortification, and social exclusion that blur meaningful distinctions between spaces of war/peace, foreign/domestic, enemy/civilian. Political geographers have explored these dimensions of “everywhere war” (Gregory 2011) across a range of theoretical and empirical contexts. Jenna Loyd situates the home within uneven militarized and racialized landscapes of war-making and, in doing so, disrupts neat divisions between battle zone and home front (Loyd 2011). William Walters introduces domopolitics: the reconfiguration of relations between citizenship, state, and territory in order to rationalize security measures in the name of a particular conception of home (Walters 2004). Domopolitics are comprised of a series of diagrams including crime, vulnerability, threat, and abuse, technologies of ‘managed’ borders, identity checks and archipelagos of detention--often extending well beyond the ‘homeland.’ Natalie Oswin explores how the two meanings of domestic, as residential shelter and national territory, converge to demarcate belonging within a national ‘family’ according to axes of race, class, nationality, and heteronomativity (Oswin 2011). Stephen Graham highlights the that the demolition of houses and “killing of cities” is a central tactic of modern warfare and occupation (Graham 2004). Setha Low and others examine the spread of gated communities and enclaves in Fortress America (and Fortress Israel, Brazil, etc…) (Low 2001; Rosen & Razin 2008, 2009); and Cindi Katz describes “banal terrorism” as producing a sense of terror and fear, embracing themes of ‘us’ versus ‘them,’ in everyday life (Katz 2007).
Aim of session:
Building upon this work, the aim of this session is to explore discourses of safety in various settings and communities--and all the contradictions they manage/contain--as well as the concrete ways humans in a variety of settings are dealing with risk, insecurity, and uncertainty (Rabinow & Samimian-Darash 2015). We are interested, particularly, with the ways in which war-making shapes domestic/home space and relations. What are the connections between the intimate, everyday spaces of the home and the geopolitical production of a homeland/nation-state? What does safety/security mean in varied contexts? Who gets to feel secure? To ground this discussion empirically, we seek submission of papers (in any stage of development) on the topics of geographies of (in)security, violence, and everyday life in the home(land). We welcome papers that focus on the U.S. as well as papers that explore these dynamics across other national and geopolitical contexts.
Please consider submitting an abstract on any of the following areas (or related areas) within political or cultural geography:
Geographies of vulnerability, uncertainty, instability, risk, threat
Ideology, consciousness, affect
The blurred spatiality of battleground and home front, militarized domesticities (Loyd, 2011)
Geopolitics of intimacy and domesticity
Geographies of law and law enforcement
Dispossession, displacement, settler colonialism and occupation
Everyday dimensions of policing, securitization, surveillance, and state violence
Gated communities, enclaves, landscape
Homelessness and housing crisis
Potential session participants should contact Sara Hughes ([log in to unmask] ) and Maegan Miller ([log in to unmask]) by 5 October 2015 to indicate their interest in participating in the session. Please include a proposed title and a 200-word abstract.
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