*Apologies for Cross-Posting*
*AAG 2017 CFP: "Geographies of extinction: space, biopolitics and
temporality"*
A central projection of the Anthropocene – an era during which humans have
become an earth-altering force – is that it will result in large-scale
species extinctions. Dubbed the ‘6th mass extinction’, scientists forecast
that as much as 35% of all biota on earth might be lost by the middle of
this century (Thomas et al., 2004). As a consequence, the concept of
extinction has leveraging power in policy and discourse at planetary
scales: it is linked to debates about climate risks, it provokes questions
about sustainable resource use, and thwarting extinction has become the
mainstay of the biodiversity conservation movement. Extinction, however,
has a much longer history as a political concept and can be found in
projects as diverse as 1980s anti-nuclearism and 19th century social
darwinism. Indeed, it was the infamous German geographer and proto-fascist
Friedrich Ratzel who used the concepts of survival and extinction to make
sense of both the biosphere and inter-state politics.
Despite the opportunities that the analysis of extinctions offers up for
understanding the governance of life in the Anthropocene, extinction has
until recently remained a marginal theme within human geography. The
nascent body of work in geography includes mapping into the
representational politics and material practices of extinction, the
concomitant violences that attend them and aesthetics they herald (Yusoff,
2012). Others, drawing upon phenomenology and bio-semiotics have sought to
articulate extinction from posthumanist standpoints (Smith, 2013), opening
up questions about whether one can examine extinction from other-than-human
perspectives or through nonhuman lifeworlds. Cognate disciplines such as
environmental history has looked into extinction discourses in the human
context, the dual ideologies of imperialism and racism they enact
(Brantlinger, 2003). In a more biopolitical vein, geographers have attended
to conservation practice as a mode of administering nonhuman life (Biermann
and Mansfield, 2014), besides foregrounding underlying logics and
calculative technologies through which extinction is rendered visible and
made meaningful (Agar, 2013).
Bringing the fields of political ecology, political geography,
environmental humanities and cognate disciplines into dialogue, this
session seeks to attract critically minded work from a whole range of
theoretical backgrounds to reflect on the question of extinction.
Submissions will address issues such as:
• Species extinctions and their relationship to human extermination
• ‘Extinction’ as a concept in the history of geographical thought
• Colonialism; ‘eradication’ of communities; violent practices of
hunting animals
• Chronophobic devices (IUCN/redlist, extinction clock, doomsday
clock)
• Death and extinction in indigenous cosmologies
• Forecasting, future catastrophist biopoltics and resilience
• Phenomenologies and more-than-human perspectives of extinction
Please get in touch with a title and short (250w) abstract *before 7
October *to Ian Klinke ([log in to unmask]) and Maan Barua (
[log in to unmask])
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