2nd CFP: American Association of Geographers Annual Meeting (AAG) 2018, New Orleans, LA, April 10-14th 2018
**Please take note: revised abstract submission deadline**
Session title: Destitution Economies: Mapping Relationships of Enforced Precarity
Sponsored by the Political Geography and the Geographic Perspectives on Women Specialty Groups of the AAG
Session organizers: Kate Coddington (Durham University, UK), Deirdre Conlon (University of Leeds, UK), Lauren Martin (Durham University, UK).
In this session, we are interested in mapping the relationships between policies of control and destitution. We enter into this debate primarily through recent and emerging work by critical geography and migration studies scholars that examines the incremental, ongoing, everyday, and seemingly banal sites and spaces where forms of commodification, dispossession, and destitution are (re)produced in immigration enforcement and in migration control and management. Scholarship on migration ‘hotspots’ at Europe’s external borders and polymorphic borders (Burridge et al. 2017; Martin and Prokkola, 2017; SocietyandSpace.org Nov 8, 2016), for example, describes how states and power are respatialized and reconfigured to produce flexible, surreptitious, and possibly unintended forms of control. In addition, research that goes beyond privatization of immigration enforcement and management examines how bureaucratized, commoditized domopolitics are embedded with the experiences of detained migrants and asylum seekers on a daily basis (see Mountz, 2010; Darling, 2011; Conlon and Hiemstra, 2016; Gill, 2016). Critical analyses of the intersections between (humanitarian) care and control also explore how precarious, insecure, or clandestine forms of subsistence for destitute asylum seekers as well as other irregular migrants have become increasingly commonplace (Martin, 2015; Coddington, 2017; Lewis et al. 2015; Williams and Massaro, 2016; Mayblin, 2017).
However, we also note that the relationships of policies of control and destitution are not limited to migration. Tightening social safety nets amidst contexts of austerity have created a new generation of social welfare policies premised on continued poverty have sparked new work in geography, especially around the concept of relational poverty (Elwood et al 2016; Lawson and Elwood 2017). In both cases, attention to political economies sits alongside a feminist political geographical focus on the everyday workings of states and other agents and institutions of power. Within this framework, economies are understood to incorporate and also to exceed more traditional approaches to political economy. Here, economies are taken to be about production and exchange; yet, simultaneously they are linked to social, cultural, intersectional, and intimate relationships that manifest in uneven and complicated ways (see Gilmore, 2007; Wilson, 2012; Pratt and Rosner, 2012; Katz, 2015). In each case, destitution and related policies enact slow violence (see Nixon, 2011; Pain, 2014; Cahill et al. forthcoming), the everyday, continual, staggered, and oft-invisible iterations of structural violence that irregular migrants and other marginalized groups encounter relentlessly in their day-to-day lives. We identify the production of ‘destitution economies,’ the sites, spaces and practices where precarity and slow violence are (re)produced and enacted for irregular migrants and other precarious populations, as a key element of life for marginalized people today.
This paper session aims to build upon these urgent concerns and emergent research contributions by bringing together political economic, feminist geographic, and interdisciplinary work on sites, spaces and practices where policies of control and destitution economies converge. We invite submissions from those thinking about destitution economies and/or engaged in related research and activism. Possible themes may address (but are not limited to) these questions:
- Where do destitution economies take shape? How might they be identified, mapped, and accounted for?
- How, precisely, do destitution economies work? How do policies of control rely on destitution economies and also help to produce them? How are they configured? What are their logics and/or limits?
- Who is involved in operating destitution economies? What roles do different state / non-state agencies and actors play? What is gained (or lost) with their involvement?
- What are the short term and longer-term effects and impacts of destitution economies vis-à-vis peoples’ everyday life, control, and for critical conceptions of the same?
- What methodological challenges and opportunities are presented by ‘destitution economies’?
- How are / might critical researchers and activists/advocates work (together) to challenge or disrupt the slow, incremental, and frequently invisible violence that destitution economies effect?
Please send title and abstract of no more than 250 words by MONDAY October 16th 2017.
Abstracts and inquiries should be sent to: Deirdre Conlon [log in to unmask]
and Kate Coddington [log in to unmask]
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