AAG CFP: Camps, Checkpoints and Border Fortifications: Critical Geographies of Containment, (Im)Mobility and Security.
Globally, the scale of encampment and containment of people on the move is receiving increasing critical attention. Establishing and maintaining camps, border fortifications and other spaces of exception is typically justified, in one way or another, by referring to (in)security.
Hegemonic discourses among practitioners, policy-makers, and scholars of international relations (IR), forced migration studies or geopolitics, tend to construct and sustain problematic subjectivities of people ‘on the move’
that are predicated on a contradictory duality: where refugees are either presented as 'innocent victims' who lack agency and are in need of protection in camps, their mobility is also equated with criminality, the smuggling of drugs and/or weapons, and terrorist threats.
Geographers have addressed the manifold ways in which dominant discourses of security are deployed to simultaneously justify 'protective custody' and containment, troubling state-centric (and camp-centric) notions of security, and theorizing security broadly and relationally across scales, through concepts such as "ontological insecurity" (Katz, 2007; Hyndman & Giles 2017; Butler 2004; Ramadan 2011; Mountz 2010, Jones 2012). In the same vein, little critical research focuses empirically on everyday security practices and their spatial enactment.
In this panel, we want to critically unpack different meanings, discourses, and practices of (in)security in camps, militarized borders and other spaces designed to contain people on the move. We wish to analyse the intricate assemblages and spatialities of control that are exemplary of the everyday security practices involved in controlling the movement of the ‘unwanted’, where containment, (in)security and porosity are intrinsically linked. By focusing on the bio-political technologies involved in this control such as camps, checkpoints and other border fortifications, we want to critically unpack the workings of these technologies and the diverse way the people affected incorporate, manipulate, twist and possibly reject in diverse ways their materialities, practices, and biopolitical technologies.
For this panel, we invite submissions on the following themes/topics:
• Securitization and militarization of aid, borders, etc.
• Relational, experiential and ontological approaches to (in)security
• Walling and b/ordering practices
• Daily geographies of militarized (border) checkpoints
• Geopolitics of encampment
• Camps and the nation-state
• Refugee agency in/and security
• Crime and criminalisation in/of camps
Discussant: Reece Jones (University of Hawaii)
Organizers:
Hanno Brankamp (University of Oxford) [log in to unmask]
Yolanda Weima (York University) [log in to unmask]
Alexandra Rijke (Wageningen University and Research) [log in to unmask]
Please send abstracts (max: 250 words) to the organizers by 20 October 2018
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